Neurological Secrets to become a more effective Marketer

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Marketers have been using attractive visuals and catchy audios to increase the efficiency of their marketing efforts since the field of marketing began. While up till now most of this has been done through guesswork and focus groups; ‘Neuromarketing’ is a new field that is focusing on turning consumer preference into a science.

Neuromarketing involves studying the effect of stimuli on purchasing decisions of people. It has long been known that people respond differently to different stimuli, but the field employs a rigorous testing and research methods to find out the exact effects. The field is focused on physiological reactions, both non-verbal and subconscious.

We have extracted six basics secrets from the field of Neuromarketing that you can begin using right now to create more effective and engaging marketing campaigns:

Secret 1: We process emotions faster than

thoughts

We feel much more than we think

While we may believe that most of our decisions are based on our minds, which we control, the reality is that we are much more in control of our mind than the other way around. This is why often things that we do not find rational still end up making us emotional, such as laughing when we know we shouldn’t, or crying when watching something sad even though we know it is fiction.

Marketing Insight

When creating any marketing material, make sure that your campaign is capable of making an instant reaction that can capture the interest of the consumers. The focus needs to be on things that catch the eye when something is being skimmed over. We are being bombarded with information through our phones, billboards and ads, televisions, computers, and our environment. So in order to create a marketing material that actually catches people’s eye, it needs to stand out or be attractive enough that people want to know more.

Secret 2: We process pictures faster than words

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Marketers have been using pictures to attract people from the beginning; we have examples of advertisements from the Roman era featuring enticing illustrations. Neuromarketing has demonstrated that this concept isn’t just common wisdom, it is fact. Our brain is much faster and better at adapting visual information quickly.

Marketing Insight

Use images, but those that tell a story or send the right message. Using boring stock images will end up tarnishing your whole campaign, as people are guided more by visual data than any other form of data. Using images that strike a chord in the mind of the consumers is the most effective way to run a successful marketing campaign. Images such as the crying Native American in vintage environmental ads have been seared into the minds of the society, and are able to instantly elicit the emotions that the marketers desired.

The reason that people still remember these images is that they represented the story that was being told in other ways; someone living close to nature crying due to nature being destroyed by environmental recklessness is an easily understandable story, which is told just through the image of the man.

Secret 3: We love human faces

Look into my eyes and tell me what you see

We are hardwired to prefer human faces from the moment we are born. Recognising and understanding other human beings is a vital survival trait, and natural selection has ensured that this trait is present in most of us. When we look at a human face, we subconsciously decipher the emotions on the face to understand the situation. Neuromarketing studies have also shown that when shown a picture, people’s eyes gravitate towards the faces first, and then they go towards what the faces are looking at. This reflects our inherent receptiveness to the faces of our own species.

Marketing Insight

Make sure that you use people’s faces effectively in your marketing campaigns. This can be done by effectively communicating the emotional response you are trying to evoke in consumers through the faces in your advertisements. You can also use this insight in creative ways, such as having the people in your advertisements pointing or looking at the piece of information you want to highlight.

Secret 4: Colours have different emotional responses

Red is the colour of love urgency

There is a reason that most warnings have yellow background and most emergency equipment is red. Yellow has been shown to create feelings of anxiety, and using it on warning boards helps people take the warnings seriously and act with caution. Similarly flashing red lights are used in emergencies because they create a feeling of urgency. There is much more to choosing the colours for your product or marketing campaign than just what looks good. What is even more interesting is that different shades of the same colour can elicit different reactions. Symbolism and interpretation is very important and there are theories that suggest it has been used as far back as 90,000 BC.

Marketing Insight

Use colours that evoke the feelings that make people want to engage with your campaigns. If you are focusing on creating a campaign for a product that releases stress, use a light blue shade, as it is associated with keeping things cool.  Also, use different colours to guide the brain into thinking what you want. Using green colours for positive stimuli and red colours for negative stimuli is a well-known way to affect the way things are perceived.

Secret 5: Names matter

What’s in a name anyway?

Names of things matter much more than conventional wisdom suggests, just changing the name can alter the whole perception of something. This secret is also used a lot by the government and media to create a narrative. In the book 1984 by George Orwell, the government controls the dictionary and creates approved word lists for the media, to make sure they can influence the way people think. Similarly, what you call something will have a prominent effect on the people’s perceptions. A study showed that the renaming of the ‘regular’ portion at a fast food portion to ‘double size’, resulted in a stark drop in the amount of food people ate.

Marketing Insight

Choose each and every word as a reinforcement that further drives your point. Words have immense power because words are how we interpret things.

Secret 6: We want to be social

There is an innate desire in all of us to be a part of the collective. We do not want to be left out; we want to be unique but we wanted to be accepted by society for our uniqueness, not shunned for it. Thus people can be influenced into doing things simply because other people are doing it.

Marketing Insight

Focus on the community. Do not just tell people about what benefits they will receive, tell them the benefits which other customers have received. This causes consumers to want to be a part of the group that receives the benefits.

Keep Marketing Real

People have been overexposed to marketing; they know the usual clichés employed by marketers and avoid the tropes, leading to diminishing returns on marketing campaigns. You need to use the secrets mentioned above in unique ways to stand out and captivate people. You also need to ensure that the message you are sending out about your product actually resonates with it, or else, any false promises made to the subconscious will result in a subconscious repulsion to your marketing for the next time.

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