Neuromarketing: The New Frontier or Old Anecdote?

Neuromarketing promises to solve our day-to-day problems of finding just the right words to get people to open our emails, to click our links, and buy our products. How best to design our product branding so that it will appeal to its target market, frontiernews and even how to structure our website to keep our customers engaged.

According to Dooley (2014) “Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience to marketing. Neuromarketing includes the direct use of brain imaging, scanning, or other brain activity measurement technology to measure a subject’s response to specific products, packaging, advertising, or other marketing elements. In some cases, the brain responses measured by these techniques may not be consciously perceived by the subject; hence, localletter this data may be more revealing than self-reporting on surveys, in focus groups, etc.”

Neuromarketing has been around for about 10 years now, but it is only just beginning to take off in terms of scientific research and in making substantial progress.

You probably know the distinction between the two brain hemispheres. The left hemisphere is the centre of linear thinking, such as language, logic, and mathematics. The right hemisphere is the centre of conceptual thoughts such as art, music and creativity. Further to this, research shows there are three brains that operate together that make the whole. The core of the brain is called the old brain and it evolved over the course of 375-60 million years ago, this is responsible for decision making. The next layer is called the middle brain, it is estimated to have developed over several millions of years later and is responsible for emotional processing. newspoke Finally we have the new brain, the outer-most later which is believed to have developed between 100,000-40,000 years ago and this determines our rational decisions, essentially it is this layer where we find our sense of self, topicals identity and consciousness (Bhavanani, 2009).

Considering this, Renvoise (2012) suggests that one of the issues is that in marketing we are addressing the decision-making part of our brain, and at 450 million years old, tbadaily it seems wise to almost everything our language of only 40,000 years can throw at it.

He goes on to detail that researchers have found that humans make decisions in an emotional manner and the decision is triggered in the old brain, kulfiy a brain that doesn´t even understand words. The book does continue to provide some useful tips.

However many ideas introduced by neuromarketing are certainly nothing new. The idea of appealing to emotion is thousands of years old. It was first documented by Aristotle in his masterly piece The Rhetoric, known as the rhetorical triangle. pressmagazines Logos, to argue by means of logic. Ethos, to argue through the use of character. Finally, pathos, to argue using the power of emotion. Aristotle himself a logician, still agreed that an argument is rarely won on logic alone, but often an argument can be won principally through the use of emotion.

This is why a speech that uses a story is much more powerful than one that has statistics alone. People are captivated by a story, they become emotionally attached. They watch it unfold in their mind, they become the protagonist and, if told well, find the same conclusion as the statistics except they are now emotionally involved and prepared to take action.

The use of emotion is something we find throughout our history. One of the best cases would be the “7 deadly sins”. Perhaps not everyone would have known objectively that they must appeal to emotions to persuade and most may have just repeated what seemed to work. But if Aristotle wrote about this over 2,000 years ago, it´s certainly nothing new.

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