Chapter 21

Picking the Right Neuromarketing Partner

In This Chapter

Knowing when to seek the help of a neuromarketing partner

Understanding the difference between neuromarketing vendors and consultants

Exploring the pros and cons of neuromarketing specialists and generalists

Asking the right questions to pick the best partner for your research needs

We cover several neuromarketing approaches in Chapter 17 that you may want to tackle on your own, but for the most part, neuromarketing studies are not do-it-yourself projects. In this chapter, we provide guidelines and checklists for selecting and working with a neuromarketing partner. We assume not only that you’re considering a first neuromarketing project, but also that you’re considering whether this project may scale up into a longer-term commitment to include neuromarketing as a regular part of your overall market research strategy. We focus on three questions:

When should you consider hiring a neuromarketing partner?

What type of partner do you need?

How do you choose the best partner to match your needs?

Picking any market research partner is an important decision that directly impacts the quality and effectiveness of your marketing and advertising. It’s a strategic decision that needs to produce a measurable return on investment (ROI). Because neuromarketing is so new and different compared to traditional market research, there is an extra obligation in this field to share information and knowledge openly. This may involve some extra education on your part, which you’ve begun by reading this book, but more important, it requires that you identify a neuromarketing partner (or partners) with the capacity and commitment to help you learn and derive real value from this new approach to market research. The purpose of this chapter is to give you the best chance to achieve that goal.

Knowing What You Need from a Neuromarketing Partner

To get started looking for a neuromarketing partner, we recommend that you ask yourself and your marketing team some preliminary questions. Our first checklist is a set of self-evaluation questions to help you pinpoint your organization’s readiness to consider neuromarketing research solutions, and the scale of support you’ll need from a neuromarketing partner to achieve your immediate and longer-term research objectives.

The importance of organizational readiness cannot be underestimated, although it usually is. The findings from brain science about resistance to novelty (see Chapter 5) apply as much to you and your organization as they do to your consumers. All human beings are curious about novelty, but we resist it. To lower resistance, we must learn more. Only as we learn more, can we pass from resistance to the comfort of familiarity.

Bringing neuromarketing into your organization will generate resistance. It’s inevitable. If your organization isn’t ready to overcome that resistance, your experiment with neuromarketing won’t succeed. There is a simple way to determine whether your organization is ready. It involves using a classic tool from organizational change consulting called the fundamental equation of successful change:

pain × vision × first steps > resistance

If the combination of pain, vision, and first steps is not great enough to overcome resistance, your change effort will fail. Note that the relationship between pain, vision, and first steps is multiplicative — if any of them is absent, the left side of the equation becomes zero, which will always be less than the right side of the equation, because resistance is always greater than zero.

Let’s translate this equation into a set of questions about your organization’s readiness to think seriously about neuromarketing. The following questions help you gauge how much leadership you’ll require from your neuromarketing partner, and what areas of expertise are important to you. These questions get at the issue of pain:

Are you dissatisfied with your current research approaches?

If so, how have your current approaches failed to live up to your expectations? Have they materially hurt you (caused you to make a money-losing business decision) or have they just not helped you (failed to produce useful or actionable insights)?

Where in your research portfolio is your dissatisfaction greatest? Rate your level of dissatisfaction in each marketing area: branding, product innovation, product design, packaging, advertising, in-store marketing, online experience, entertainment media.

If you have no complaints about your current research approaches, don’t waste your time trying to bring in neuromarketing. You don’t need it. On the other hand, if you’re less than completely satisfied with business as usual, you need to understand both the level and focus of pain in the marketing organization, whether it’s moderate (lack of fresh insights) or severe (recent publicly humiliating packaging disaster), and where in the organization it’s most acute.

The following questions relate to the issue of vision:

Why do you care about the intuitive side of your consumers?

How do you believe nonconscious thinking, emotions, and System 1 decision making are relevant to your relationship with your consumers?

Does your senior management have an understanding of, or better yet, a commitment to the intuitive consumer model of consumer behavior?

If your organization doesn’t already have thoughtful answers to the first two questions, your level of vision is low, and your neuromarketing partner will have to help you build it up, preferably before launching a pilot project. If your senior management is following, rather than leading, on embracing a vision of your customers as intuitive consumers, that’s an issue you may need to take up with your neuromarketing partner as well.

Answering these questions helps you gauge whether you should be looking for a neuromarketing partner who can help you develop your vision for neuromarketing and refine your expectations for what you want to learn about your consumers, or whether you simply need a partner who can help you implement a project for which you’ll provide the thought leadership.

The following questions address the issue of first steps:

Do you need an additional investment in education before proceeding with a pilot project?

Can you identify which first project is most likely to provide maximum value for your organization?

How prepared are you to fill out your pre-flight checklist (see Chapter 20) for this project?

The question about additional education is an important one. We’ve seen too many neuromarketing studies end in disappointment because the clients didn’t have an adequate grounding in neuromarketing principles, so they didn’t know what to expect. When you combine the possibility of misunderstanding with the inevitability of resistance, you get a significant potential for failure.

Answering these questions helps you determine what you need to do next to move your project forward, and helps you further refine your needs regarding a neuromarketing partner. Here’s a hint: If you aren’t sure how to answer the second two questions, your answer to the first question is “Yes.”

Resistance can be thought of as a constant. Your organization will always provide some amount of resistance to any new idea. Rather than estimate it directly, just look at how your organization scores on pain, vision, and first steps. If any of those ingredients is missing, you need to shore them up before diving in to your first neuromarketing project.

In addition, before beginning your evaluation of potential neuromarketing partners, you need to ask yourself some questions about the scale of support your organization will require in the longer-term. These issues go beyond your requirements for a pilot project and are meant to get you thinking about whether a neuromarketing partner can scale with you as your needs grow over time.

What volume of neuromarketing testing would you require if you adopted it across all your marketing and advertising needs?

How geographically dispersed is your business, and in what regions would you require your neuromarketing partner to operate? What range of languages and cultures does your business touch?

What market research partners do you work with today? Do they provide neuromarketing services, and can they integrate neuromarketing results with other data they provide for you?

Neuromarketing is still a relatively small field, and vendors vary in their throughput capacity and global reach. By first estimating how big your needs could get, you’re better prepared to evaluate how big your neuromarketing partner(s) will need to be to support those requirements.

The question about your current market research relationships is worth a brief comment. Most large research providers either have invested in neuromarketing themselves or have established working relationships with neuromarketing vendors. You need to know what these relationships are and how you can leverage them to your advantage.

As we discuss in Chapter 18, your investment in neuromarketing will ultimately be optimized only if you can effectively integrate the data you generate through neuromarketing with other data you’re collecting through other means. Most important, this includes all your sales and marketing data on point-of-sale performance, media spend, trade and consumer promotions, online and social media activity, and so on. To integrate these mountains of data with the results of neuromarketing experiments and interventions is a massive task that will be greatly aided if you can take advantage of existing relationships between your neuromarketing and traditional research vendors.

With answers to these questions in hand, you’ve got a good sense of both the immediate needs (in terms of organizational readiness) and the longer-term requirements (in terms of scale and reach) that your neuromarketing partner needs to support.

Looking At Your Options

When considering your options for engaging a neuromarketing partner, you first need to consider what kind of partner would be the best fit. There are two possibilities:

Neuromarketing vendors: Firms that specialize in performing neuromarketing studies. Vendors usually take responsibility for the full execution of a project — designing the project, recruiting the participants, collecting and analyzing the data, and reporting the results. They employ their own delivery teams, usually specialize in one or a small subset of technologies, and use their own methodologies, equipment, and facilities to do the project for you. Vendors tend to be technology specialists and advocates for their chosen approach.

Neuromarketing consultants: Individuals or firms that act as advisors, interpreters, or intermediaries between you and neuromarketing vendors. Consultants don’t conduct neuromarketing research directly, but they may provide a variety of support services such as education and training, advice on selecting a neuromarketing vendor, oversight of neuromarketing projects, and integration or interpretation of results from multi-vendor projects. Consultants tend to be technology generalists, less committed to one technology, and more willing to consider different approaches and mixed approaches to solving your specific research problems.

Vendors provide you with a complete package based on their professional assessment of the match between your needs and their capabilities. Individual engagements with vendors have a fixed start and a fixed end. When the project is done, your deliverable is usually a written document that reports the data analysis results, interpretations and conclusions, and recommendations.

Consultants provide a more varied set of services based on a mutual determination of your research needs. You may engage them for a single project, or for longer-term ongoing advice or program management. They can also be brought in for short-term assignments, like presenting an educational session, helping evaluate vendors or technologies, or providing a second opinion on a study’s results.

Sometimes, just to make things a little more complicated, neuromarketing vendors have their own consultants on staff and offer consulting as part of their services. Vendors that strive to be more of a strategic research partner often have a consulting group that performs many of the services we’ve described. These consultants are, of course, selling their vendor’s solutions, so they aren’t completely impartial, but they’re often experienced generalists who have a broad perspective and a lot of expertise to share. Other neuromarketing vendors are more transactional service providers and focus on outputting a standard product with few frills. In other words, some neuromarketing vendors are more like Nordstrom, and others are more like Costco.

Whether a neuromarketing vendor or consultant is the right choice for you depends critically on your organizational readiness and your long-term ambitions. There are four basic directions to take:

If your organization is well-grounded in neuromarketing concepts and principles, your level of dissatisfaction with traditional approaches is high, and you have a clear and specific idea about what you want to accomplish with neuromarketing, you should find a vendor whose technology orientation matches your own preferences, and go for it.

If your organization does not have a good understanding of the scientific foundations of neuromarketing, the intuitive consumer model, or the potential benefits of neuromarketing, you should consider working with a consultant to improve your organizational readiness before launching your first study.

If your organization is at the cutting edge of market research and you have the budget and the ambition to use research for competitive advantage, then you should consider enlisting both consultants and vendors in your quest for ongoing leadership in your industry.

If you’re perfectly happy with your current market research outputs and guidance, you really shouldn’t be playing around with neuromarketing, at least for now.

In the following sections, we look at these options in a bit more detail.

When to enlist a neuromarketing vendor

Here are five indicators that selecting a neuromarketing vendor is the right decision for you:

You judge your organizational readiness for neuromarketing to be high.

You have prior experience with the type of study you’re commissioning.

The study is well defined in terms of objectives, hypotheses, materials, target population, and action implications.

The study involves a single application area (like packaging) rather than a more complex design (first measure brand associations; then measure which associations are strongest with different packages).

You have an established relationship with a vendor who understands your marketing needs, has earned your trust, and has given you good advice and results in the past.

Neuromarketing vendors tend to be strong advocates for their own methods and technology specializations. As we emphasize in Chapters 16 and 17, every technology has its pros and cons, and you need to get vendors to focus on how they can improve your business outcomes rather than how they fare in abstract technology debates. The competitive advantage of a vendor who specializes in electroencephalography (EEG), for example, is going to be a function of its capacity to produce consistent, high-quality, and business-relevant results in a timely manner, not the fact that EEG provides “high temporal resolution” and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) does not.

When to enlist a neuromarketing consultant

Here are five indicators that working with a neuromarketing consultant may be the right decision for you:

You judge that you need to improve your organizational readiness before embarking on a neuromarketing pilot project.

You don’t have prior experience with the type of study you’re commissioning, and you want third-party advice on how best to proceed.

You have unresolved questions about the objectives, details, or business implications of a study you’re considering.

You want to put together a study or multi-study program that may require integrating multiple technologies or vendors.

You don’t have an established relationship with a neuromarketing vendor, and you want advice on how to select the right vendor to support your needs.

It may be even more important to carefully scrutinize the qualifications of a neuromarketing consultant than a neuromarketing vendor. After all, anyone with a Rolex and a fancy suit can call himself a consultant. What you need to look for in a neuromarketing consultant is expertise in four areas:

Methodologies and technologies: A sound understanding of statistics and a broad range of research methodologies available from neuromarketing vendors.

Vendors and industry: Extensive industry experience and in-depth knowledge of the relative strengths and weaknesses of various neuromarketing vendors, gained from working with them or for them on multiple projects.

Brain science: Up-to-date knowledge of the latest advances in brain science, and a point of view on which leading-edge methodologies have the greatest potential for applications in marketing.

Marketing: A solid understanding of marketing issues and challenges, so the consultant can relate to the needs of marketers and effectively translate science and technology issues into the language of business.

There is one type of neuromarketing study that consultants do perform on a regular basis: desk research. This is an assessment of a marketing challenge using neuromarketing concepts and insights — often called best practices — that are available in the public domain or derived from the consultant’s personal experience. Sometimes the insights provided by desk research are sufficient to answer the question at hand without the need to collect new data in a full neuromarketing study, saving both time and money.

Neuromarketing Orientations and Specializations

When pondering the selection of a neuromarketing partner, there is one more distinction you need to consider: Do you need a technology specialist or an integrated-solution generalist? Put in simple terms: Do you need a partner who knows how to do one thing really well, or do you need a partner who knows how to do a lot of things, but probably none of them as well as a dedicated specialist? In this section, we look at each of these orientations.

Technology specialists

A neuromarketing technology specialist has developed expertise in one technology area (or a small number of related areas) and bases its product and service offerings on the use of that technology to answer market research questions. We covered a number of technologies in Chapters 16 and 17. Here’s how they tend to cluster in technology specialist firms:

fMRI specialists: fMRI is the most technologically advanced specialization in neuromarketing. Conducting an fMRI test is basically a medical procedure and requires the use of highly trained and certified staff. Most fMRI firms are led by medical doctors and world-class researchers at major universities. They seldom advocate or employ any other techniques.

EEG specialists: EEG data collection is much less difficult than fMRI data collection, but the data processing and analytic procedures used by EEG firms can be quite advanced, requiring PhD-level experience in signal processing and statistics to translate raw brain-wave signals into meaningful metrics. EEG firms often employ eye tracking and some biometrics in addition to EEG data collection, but their value proposition is usually focused predominantly on their expertise in EEG technology.

Biometrics specialists: These vendors specialize in peripheral nervous system measures rather than brain measures. They often combine autonomic and somatic nervous system measures such as electrodermal activity, heart rate, facial muscle movement (electromyography [EMG]), eye tracking, and body movements. A separate tradition focuses more exclusively on expert and automated facial expression analysis. Leaders of biometrics companies are usually PhD psychologists (and some MDs), often with specializations in the measurement of human emotions.

Behavioral economics specialists: Firms specializing in behavioral economics are relatively new to neuromarketing. They draw on psychology and economics, and usually offer solutions using behavioral experiments to study marketing issues. Unlike other specialists who tend to focus on internal sources of consumer behavior, these firms focus on understanding and manipulating the external context or situation in order to impact marketing outcomes. They also focus more on choice than more internally focused vendors.

Eye-tracking specialists: Several firms focus on eye tracking exclusively, either by providing in-lab studies or by offering eye-tracking analytics over the Internet. Eye-tracking firms benefit from relatively standardized metrics (compared to other specializations) and a deep body of supporting research. Eye tracking is more commoditized, with firms competing less on unique expertise, and more on price, turnaround time, and marginal technical advantages.

Online services specialists: As described in Chapter 17, a number of firms have begun offering online research services that leverage the scale and reach of the Internet to test large numbers of people over short periods of time at very reasonable prices. One specialized application that is becoming popular as an online service is automated facial expression analysis, operating through a standard computer webcam. Other emerging applications use behavioral response-time approaches — like the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and semantic- and affective-priming models described in Chapter 17 — to draw conclusions about the internal mental processes and memory associations of consumers.

Services offered by these technology specialists vary considerably in terms of the complexity of the underlying science, their normal turnaround times, and their average cost. Although individual results may differ, Table 21-1 gives a general indication of how these technology specialists compare on these three dimensions.

As is clear from Table 21-1, neuromarketing specializations fall into a rough hierarchy of complexity. Generally, the deeper the scientific expertise underlying the focus of specialization, the more constrained the data collection environment, the greater preparation required (such as applying sensors), the longer the turnaround time, and the higher the cost. Although these factors should play a role in your decision making, they need to be assessed in light of the business objectives you want to achieve from your study. The best approach is to find the right balance between convenience and cost on the one hand, and business value on the other.

Integrated solution generalists

Some neuromarketing firms and consultants are more generalists than specialists. They tend to have extensive experience in complex study designs and know how to combine multiple specializations and research approaches to answer particularly challenging research questions. You should consider using integrated solution generalists when you want to test a complex marketing initiative or when you want to compare alternative research perspectives across multiple aspects of your overall marketing, shopping, and product research efforts.

We introduced the idea of an integrated research program in Chapter 18. The concept involves developing and implementing a multi-method testing environment that encompasses all three stages of the consumer cycle of experience with your brands and products, which consists of three stages of interaction and behavior:

Marketing: Measuring the impact of your marketing messages on brand and product attitudes and associations

Shopping: Measuring how responses to marketing impact consumer behavior in the shopping context of search, choice, and buying

Consuming: Measuring how purchased products are consumed, and how consumption impacts beliefs, attitudes, and expectations, which then become inputs into consumers’ responses to marketing

Building an integrated research program to track consumer responses across these three stages is a significant challenge for market research. Integrated solution specialists are developing the expertise and breadth of experience to help with this challenge. As discussed in Chapter 18, methods that can be brought together in an integrated research program under the direction of an integrated solutions specialist include

Observational studies: Ethnographic and anthropological studies of consumers in their natural habitats

Lab-based studies: Biometrics, neurometrics, simulations

Online research: Response-time studies, discrete choice testing, webcam-based implicit response studies, social media content analysis

In-store, point-of-sale research: Buying behavior, in-store behavioral experiments, signage and display testing, shelf-display studies, traffic pattern studies

Performance and return-on-investment (ROI) studies: Market mix modeling, matched sample media testing using consumer panel data

Some of these testing areas fall exclusively under neuromarketing, some fall under traditional market research, and some include a mixture of techniques. Integrated solution generalists have the breadth of perspective to see them all as complementary parts of a larger research enterprise.

Questions to Ask a Prospective Neuromarketing Partner

In this section, we provide a checklist of questions to ask a prospective neuromarketing partner. This checklist assumes that you’ve already completed an organizational readiness and scale of support self-assessment as described earlier in this chapter. You’ve narrowed your options to a subset of neuromarketing vendors or consultants, either specialists or generalists. Now your task is to “cull the herd” and select the best partner to match your needs. This involves three steps:

1. Screen out potential partners who do not meet basic criteria.

2. Create a short list of potential partners with the competencies and experience you’re seeking.

3. Select one partner you feel best matches your needs and is most compatible with your working style.

Culling the herd

The first set of questions are those you would ask any research partner, whether a traditional research firm or a neuromarketer. These questions help you to eliminate potential partners who don’t meet your basic requirements. There are four types of questions you should consider:

Financial stability: You may not want to assume the risk of working with a firm that doesn’t have a sound financial foundation. Such firms may perform erratically, or may even disappear in the middle of a project. On the other hand, if you’re an early adopter who is willing to assume these risks, this will be less of an issue for you.

We suggest two due diligence tasks to assess financial stability:

• Check out trade references. Many banks or credit holders will provide references on how companies pay their bills, which is a good proxy for how they handle their finances more generally.

• Ask for the financial statements. You can easily find this information yourself if you’re dealing with a public company, but if the firm is private, you may want to ask for copies of its audited financial statements. Reputable firms will share at least summary financial statements.

Experience: For both the firm and the employees who would be working with you, ask for examples of prior work, years in business, and research experience. For technology specialists, ask for specific evidence of competence in the technology area, including backgrounds of the company’s key scientists and leaders. Be sure to ask which employees will be working with you, and confirm their experience and levels of expertise.

The quality of the individuals you’ll be working with, not the credentials of the firm as a whole, will have the biggest impact on the success of your project.

Certifications: You may want to exclude vendors who aren’t members of relevant professional associations or who haven’t subscribed to industry codes of ethics (such as those of the Advertising Research Foundation [ARF] or Neuromarketing Science & Business Association [NMSBA]). This is simply a safeguard and encourages vendors to participate in the emerging standardization of the neuromarketing industry.

Capacity: You should establish early on whether a vendor is planning to carry out your project independently or whether it plans on using subcontractors for parts of the project. Subcontracting may be fine for operational parts of the project, such as participant recruitment, but if the firm is outsourcing key elements of the project, such as data collection, that may be a red flag. Also, you need to ask each prospective partner about its capacity to meet your scale of support requirements, as determined by your organizational self-assessment.

Use these questions to decide which potential partners make it to your short list. When your short list is established, prepare a second round of inquiry to select a winning partner from the set of basically qualified candidates.

Selecting the winner

In this phase of the process, you’re interested in more intangible qualities like stylistic compatibility, scientific transparency, depth of relevant experience, and attitude toward confidentiality. We recommend drilling down into four areas: working style, directly relevant experience, scientific openness, and confidentiality and regulatory compliance.

As a supplement to this checklist for evaluating prospective neuromarketing partners, we recommend the excellent guideline from the market research trade association ESOMAR, "36 Questions to Help Commission Neuroscience Research," available at www.esomar.org/uploads/public/knowledge-and-standards/codes-and-guidelines/ESOMAR_36-Questions-to-help-commission-neuroscience-research.pdf.

Working style

What you want to learn here is how compatible the prospective partner’s working style is with yours. Whether you want to have a close collaboration or you just want the partner to go off and do the work, you need to find out if the partner views the work the same way you do. Here are some key questions to ask:

Will company principals be working on my project? If so, who? If not, what kind of involvement will they have?

Who on your team is ultimately responsible for the success of my project? How and when can I reach them?

Will you provide a detailed work plan and schedule of the project? What level of collaboration will you want from my team, when, from whom, and for how long?

If I don’t understand what you’re doing or how you’re doing it, how do I get answers?

Directly relevant experience

This is not so much general experience, which should have been assessed in the first round of questions, but rather specific experience conducting studies like yours. You need to know if the prospective partner has done this many times before, or is essentially learning on the job. Ask the following:

How often have you done projects like this one before?

What expertise do you bring to this project that your competitors can’t match?

How much experience does each of your team members have with this kind of project? Which team member would you consider to be the thought leader for my project?

Can I speak directly with any reference customers for whom your company has conducted studies similar to this one?

Scientific openness

The more complex and sophisticated the methods used by your neuromarketing partner, the more help you’re going to need understanding exactly what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. Some vendors are quite open about their techniques; others prefer to maintain a sense of mystery around their proprietary methods. You need to determine which approach works for you. Here are some questions you’ll want to ask:

How do I know your methods are scientifically sound?

Can you show me how your techniques are related to established scientific literature and findings?

Can I speak with any academic (non-commercial) references, not affiliated with your company, who can vouch for your methods and techniques?

What aspects of your approach and methodology can you not share with me because they’re proprietary or company secrets?

Confidentiality and regulatory compliance

Maintaining standards of confidentiality for participants in your study is critical for ensuring compliance with human subjects research principles (see Chapter 22 for more details). In addition, you want to be sure that your prospective partner understands and will respect your requirements for project confidentiality. Here are some questions to ask:

Are your experimental techniques approved by an institutional (or independent) review board (IRB) for proper treatment of human subjects?

How will you maintain the confidentiality of my project participants?

How will you maintain the confidentiality of my results?

What other clients have you worked with on similar projects and how happy were they with the results? (This is a trick question. If the vendor talks openly about other clients with you, they’ll probably talk openly about you with other clients.)