Is Neuromarketing the New Way to Gain a Competitive Edge?

It's a dog eat dog world out there. Competition is getting tough! And businesses and product driven companies are striving everyday to push the envelope in their customer service, quality, and marketing. When it comes to new marketing techniques, let's take a look at the most recent focus and concentration of marketing, neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing is the research and studies that are gathered by customers' sense, sensorimotor, and cognitive response to marketing tactics. Information is collected through multiple tests that stimulate the activity in parts of the brain and measure the response or even ones physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, etc.) Basically, the data collected is to measure a customer's preference to the branding or product.

Even now businesses are designing their products and services based off of consumer's "cognitive bias" or neuromarketing including well known companies such as; Coke, Pepsi, Campbell's, and Microsoft (just to name a few).

Starting this fall, Campbell's Soup consumers will be seeing changes in their packaging design for all their favorite varieties. Based off of neuromarketing results, Campbell's will be color-coding all their soup varieties into categories in order to make their patrons search for their favorite flavors easier and more recognizable. As seen below, other changes such as the prominent image on the soups can will also be revamped based off of the visual impact it has strive to have on consumers. Information and photo (below) from the article Soup on the Brain.

Another study done was during the "Coke vs. Pepsi Taste Challenge." According to "The Science of Branding" by Edwin Coyer, "brain scans show that the brand of your soda is more important than its taste... Read Montague, Director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, has now provided proof that branding plays with our brains. Last year he decided to repeat the Pepsi Challenge, but scan the activity of the brain at the same time. Using a non-invasive technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the scans reveal which parts of the brain are active in real time.

When Montague gave a taste of an unnamed soda to his volunteers he found that more people preferred Pepsi. On the scan images the ventral putamen, one of the brain's reward centers, had a response that was five times stronger than for people who preferred Coke."

So does the marketing world conspire to brain wash consumers into buying their services and products? Not exactly, they are just appealing to your senses!

To read up on Microsoft's research efforts please go to:

Microsoft and Mediabrands Unveil Groundbreaking Research

Neuromarketing at Microsoft

More on Neuromarketing:

Neuromarketing: Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet

Posted March 16, 2010 | Read all posts by Kelly Pageau