Chapter 13
When Consumers’ Brains Go Online
In This Chapter
Recognizing how online marketing is different from traditional marketing
Understanding how our brains consume web pages
Looking at what causes website frustration, confusion, and rejection
Seeing how we use nonconscious processes when we go online
Identifying three major ways the Internet is changing our world
The human brain has encountered something brand-new with the invention of the online world. Throughout history, our brains have absorbed many profound innovations in communication technologies, beginning with the invention of language itself, then writing and reading, then the visual languages of photography and film, and most recently that pinnacle of human civilization, TV.
But the online experience includes and goes beyond all these modes of communication. It challenges and entices our brains in new ways, enabling conscious goals and tasks to be pursued within a context of new and unique nonconscious primes and triggers, all mixed together inside a dynamic new presentation medium called a web page.
Because the Internet increases mental demands compared to more passive media, we shouldn’t be surprised to find our brains employing cognitive miser strategies to manage the resulting cognitive load. To measure such strategies, marketers need to rely more on neuromarketing techniques to access the nonconscious processes involved.
Online marketing and web experience may seem to be areas where neuromarketing would be well established. But, in fact, neuromarketing has been applied only in limited ways in the online world. This is because the Internet presents many unique challenges for brain science research that don’t appear in more passive marketing contexts like TV. As we illustrate throughout this chapter, these challenges revolve around the idea that people’s brains are much more active when they go online than when they’re relaxing in front of their TVs. This difference means that many of the lessons marketers — and neuromarketers — have learned in more traditional media have to be reexamined when consumers’ brains go online.
First, we look at how online marketing differs from traditional marketing. Then we examine the ways in which a web page can provide a satisfying or frustrating experience, and how nonconscious processes contribute to those outcomes. Next, we consider how the Internet extends our ability to satisfy many very basic human needs, with some interesting implications for our cognitive miser brains. Finally, we look at how neuromarketing approaches can be used to test online marketing and improve online experiences.
Understanding How Online Marketing Is Different
In the early days of television, TV commercials looked a lot like print advertising. Similarly, in the early days of the Internet, online advertising looked a lot like TV advertising. But marketers soon realized that there were big differences between watching TV and going online. Three of those differences define much of the challenge for marketing and advertising in the online context.
Embracing interactivity and consumer control
As we saw in Chapter 11, TV viewing is a passive activity. People do it to relax, and they’re quite willing to let the TV determine the flow of their entertainment experience for long periods of time (interrupted now and again by a channel change or fast-forwarding through an ad break). In such a state of relaxation, people are extremely unmotivated to pay attention to advertising, and they become more susceptible to repetitive conditioning by cognitively undemanding, emotionally satisfying ads.
Going online is quite different. Unlike TV, the Internet is an active medium. When people go online, they’re doing something, not just watching something. And this can radically change how they receive and process product information and advertising. There are two key dimensions to this active-passive distinction:
Interactivity: Going online is interactive in the sense that it gives consumers opportunities to actively participate in a dynamic experience with the website itself (interactive content), as well as with other consumers, advertisers, retailers, and product providers (interactive communication). This provides new opportunities for learning and satisfying wants and needs.
Control: Going online allows consumers to control how they interact with online content. An online ad, for example, can be completely ignored, viewed without taking any further action, or clicked on to access more information or even complete a purchase.
To be involved in an interactive experience is to be mentally engaged. Although advertisers may assume that more online interaction is always better, researchers have actually found a more complicated relationship between interaction and advertising effectiveness. This relationship is largely driven by the extent to which consumers are actively interested in (and paying attention to) the message of the ad.
If interest and attention are low — as when an ad is unrelated to a person’s reason for viewing a web page — interactive features may be observed, but the consumer will not be engaged enough to actually use them. In such cases, the mere existence of the interactive features may act as a peripheral cue or low-attention prime for the non-engaged consumer. Because the consumer is likely to believe that interactivity is basically a good thing, this peripheral cue can lead to increased liking of the website, the ad, and the associated brand or product.
If, on the other hand, interest and attention are high — as when an ad is highly relevant to a person’s reason for viewing a web page — then interactive features can have contradictory effects. To the extent that the interactive features facilitate choice and allow the consumer to selectively focus on the most important information, they can enhance the web page experience and have a positive effect on persuasion, brand favorability, and purchase intent. But if the interactive features are too taxing on the consumer’s mental resources — for example, if they make it hard for the consumer to manage the interactive information flow or keep track of his location — interactivity can divert attention away from relevant information gathering, increase frustration and confusion, and diminish persuasion, brand favorability, and purchase intent.
Embracing interactivity, therefore, is not quite as simple as it might appear at first glance. More interactivity is not necessarily better. If the web page is not carefully designed to balance interactive capabilities and cognitive demands, interactivity can lead to less effective, not more effective, online advertising.
A similar mixed picture has been found for the degree of control provided by a web page. As with interactivity, having more control can lead to more positive outcomes, such as higher satisfaction, better knowledge and recall, and higher confidence in judgments and choices. But if the control features are too demanding on mental resources, they can have a negative impact on all these outcomes.
Determining the extent to which interactivity or control has positive or negative impacts on consumers’ online experiences is difficult with traditional self-reporting measures. Neuromarketing measures can often provide better indicators of the cognitive responses involved, including attention, emotional intensity, and positive or negative emotional reactions.
Aligning ads with online tasks and goals
People go online with a purpose. Unlike watching TV, which people generally do with no other purpose than to be entertained, going online is basically impossible without some purpose, intention, or task driving the behavior. Purpose changes how people engage with advertising.
When ads are encountered in a passive entertainment context, as we show in Chapter 11, they’re seldom processed with System 2 logical thinking (the direct route to advertising effectiveness). They usually don’t attract much attention, and when they do, it’s often because they’re generating a negative emotional response by disrupting the entertainment experience. Advertising effectiveness in such a context becomes a question of bypassing attention, persuasion, and recall with low-attention processing, repetitive conditioning, and implicit memory (the indirect route to advertising effectiveness).
In an active, goal-directed context, however, the direct route may become more relevant. If a consumer is viewing a web page with a purpose, and that purpose involves acquiring information, then advertising on that page can become something other than a disruption — it can become another source of information that may help with the task at hand. When the human brain is pursuing a goal, it’s drawn to anything in its environment that can help it achieve that goal (see Chapter 7). Online advertising in the context of goal pursuit may be processed quite differently from traditional TV advertising, but only if it’s aligned with the online tasks and goals being pursued by the consumer at the moment the ad is encountered.
The problem for a lot of online advertising is that it isn’t aligned with online tasks and goals. There are exceptions, of course. The most-aligned type of online advertising is search advertising — those little text ads that appear above and to the right of your search results on Google or other search engines. If you’re searching for information about a digital camera, for example, ads offering best prices on that camera will appear next to your search results. Those ads will be directly relevant to your interests at that moment, so you’re more likely to pay attention to them.
This alignment advantage of search advertising is reflected in how advertisers invest their online spending. Search ads remain the most popular form of online advertising, accounting for almost half of all online ad expenditures in 2012, compared to about one-third for display ads, which are usually much more graphically rich but are generally not related to immediate tasks and goals.
So, online advertising can perform much like the direct-route model says it should, if it’s aligned with the consumer’s tasks and goals. But if it isn’t aligned with those tasks and goals, it’s more likely to be treated like a traditional TV ad, avoided (at least consciously) as a distraction to the task at hand. It may be scanned peripherally, much like a TV ad is scanned with low attention, but it’s unlikely to attract attention, communicate a persuasive message, or promote a click-through action, as the direct-route model would predict.
When online ads are aligned with online tasks, there is a real opportunity for advertising to become less intrusive and more relevant to the wants and needs of consumers. Such an outcome benefits both consumers and advertisers: Consumers get exposed to ads that have real informational value to them, and advertisers get to put their message in front of an audience that has a real interest in receiving it.
Dissolving the gap between marketing and buying
The final way in which online marketing differs from traditional marketing is in its ability to provide immediate gratification of purchase intent — for the first time since the demise of the door-to-door salesman, consumers can see it, want it, and buy it all at the same time. When the sale is a couple of clicks away from the offer, one of marketing’s most central purposes is significantly diminished: It’s no longer necessary to create a lasting memory that will survive in either explicit or implicit form for days or weeks between message exposure and purchase opportunity.
Coupled with advertising that aligns to consumer goals and tasks, the ability to complete a purchase at the point of ad exposure converts online experiences into full-blown sales experiences. This means that testing the relative effectiveness of online marketing can encompass choice and action outcomes, as well as attention and emotional responses to advertising. To the extent that these factors operate below the level of conscious awareness or employ heuristics (judgment and decision-making shortcuts), neuromarketing methods provide useful tools for comparing different designs.
The ability to convert a marketing exposure into a sales opportunity has increased the importance of the landing page (the page you arrive at when you click on an ad) in website design. Landing pages are where the offer presented in the online ad gets converted into a choice opportunity and, if everything goes right, a purchase. Guidelines for increasing the persuasive power of landing pages have been developed by web designers, and many of those guidelines take at least part of their inspiration from neuromarketing principles covered in this book, such as processing fluency, nonconscious goal activation, loss aversion, and Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion (see Part II).
Building the Perfect Website
Because people go online with a purpose, websites exist to fulfill those purposes, whatever they might be. A “perfect” website, therefore, is one that enables its visitors to achieve their goals and accomplish their tasks easily, with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
How the brain consumes web pages
When people view a web page, their eyes scan the page using two types of attention we’ve encountered before: bottom-up, or involuntary, attention and top-down, or directed, attention (see Chapter 5).
Extensive eye-tracking research has documented that bottom-up attention is automatically activated, without conscious control, immediately when a person sees something new in his or her visual field. Some features of viewed objects are naturally visually salient, meaning they automatically attract bottom-up visual attention. Examples include
Brightness relative to background
Distinct borders
The center of the viewing area
Tight groupings of visual objects
Overlapping items
Movement (especially around the edges)
Faces and locations where faces are looking
These automatic attractions are so predictable that some companies now provide software that can identify the salient elements of a web page or other visual object, as well as the likely order in which those elements will be viewed, with up to 80 percent accuracy compared to a real eye-tracking study.
Using this neuroscience-based information, it becomes feasible to tune a website design with salient visual features to guide viewers’ gaze patterns to desired locations on the page. Bottom-up attention generates a saliency map of regions on the web page that are worth scanning. It allows us to nonconsciously divide up a web page into areas of high or low informational promise and sets the stage for the second type of attention, directed top-down attention, which is driven by the viewer’s goals and intentions.
An important finding from eye-tracking research is that our goals make a difference for where we look. Whether viewing a web page, a store shelf, or a magazine print ad, people use different scanning strategies when they have a goal in mind. Goals largely determine what we pay attention to, and several studies have shown how information that is more relevant to goal attainment is attended to more than information that is irrelevant or distracting.
Visual selection is the process of choosing specific areas of the web page to focus on. If a consumer is picking an item from a set of alternatives, for example, she will fix her gaze more selectively on a subset of the available alternatives and will most likely make her choice from that subset. It has been found that the more time people spend looking at an item, the more likely they are to choose it. This creates an opportunity for web designers to structure the way choice options are presented. By increasing the duration of presentation of some options over others, they can increase the odds of those options being chosen.
Web pages don’t have an objective property of “effectiveness.” They’re only more or less effective relative to a given goal or task. If a neuromarketing vendor offers to test web pages or websites without giving study participants an explicit task to follow, the results are not likely to tell you much, because people will create their own tasks, which will vary unpredictably across the test group. As a neuromarketing client, it’s your responsibility to know what task you want your visitors to accomplish on every page of your website, and to communicate this to your neuromarketing vendor so that these are the tasks against which your website’s performance is tested.
Website frustration, confusion, and rejection
Everyone has experienced website frustration at one time or another. The main cause is a failure of alignment between web page design and user intent — that is, failure of the web page to deliver on the goals and expectations of the person interacting with the page. Web usability researchers normally collect evidence for alignment or misalignment by asking people what they’re experiencing, commonly referred to as the talk-aloud method. This technique has limitations similar to other self-reporting methods in that people may not be aware of the real causes of their frustration and may provide rationalizations that seem plausible at the time but point redesign efforts in the wrong direction.
Using clues from eye tracking and involuntary physiological responses like increased emotional agitation (arousal) or facial muscle movement (increased activation of frown muscles), neuromarketing researchers can provide additional information on how a web page is performing, beyond verbal self-reports. Given that goals can be nonconsciously pursued (as discussed in Chapter 7), it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that frustrating those goals may also be nonconsciously experienced, with significant nonconscious and behavioral impacts on the web page viewer.
One factor that clearly influences web experience satisfaction, or lack of it, is the presence and disruptive impact of advertising on the web page. Ads usually exist around the periphery (edges) of a web page, and they usually aren’t aligned with viewer intent. In such cases, they can have a peripheral disruptive influence that’s difficult to measure with traditional methods. Even eye tracking can be misleading in this situation, because it only records the center of our visual gaze (called our foveal vision) but not our peripheral gaze (called parafoveal vision). If ads are located around the periphery of the page, they may appear in the eye-tracking record to be completely ignored (the source of a common eye-tracking result called banner blindness). But in fact, they’re being observed peripherally, and they can have a significant impact on the overall web page experience.
Peripheral ads on a web page can disrupt the viewing experience by creating distracting clutter, especially if they involve bottom-up attention attractors such as bright colors, flashing animations, or moving images. Movement can be especially intrusive because our peripheral vision is biologically tuned to be sensitive to movement around the edges of our visual field, so we can’t help but be attracted to it. Unfortunately for advertisers, that attraction comes at a negative emotional cost, because sensitivity to peripheral movement evolved as an emotional marker for identifying danger. This doesn’t mean that we drop our laptops and run off in terror when we perceive movement at the edges of our web pages (although some online ads do come close to triggering that response), but we do experience an increase in annoyance and resistance that impacts our memories and future behaviors, and may or may not reach conscious awareness.
Some online publishers have attempted to counter these negative effects by moving the ads into the center of the page where they can intersect with the viewer’s task flow. However, researchers studying this tactic have found a contradictory result: For ads that were not aligned with intent, putting the ad in the middle of the task flow significantly increased awareness and memory for the ad, but it also resulted in lower purchase intent scores — lower, in fact, than when no ad was presented at all. People noticed the ad more but had a negative emotional response to the disruption, and the advertiser paid the price. For ads that were aligned with intent, the inline ad was much more successful, improving awareness, recall, consideration set inclusion, and purchase intent.
Because online experiences are mostly task driven, the traditional model of maximizing conscious awareness through attention, persuasion, and recall can achieve positive conscious outcomes — provided the website and all its content elements, including advertising, are aligned with the goals and intentions of the consumer.
So, here’s an interesting irony: The online website, being in many ways a virtual version of the door-to-door salesman model, may be a better fit for the traditional view of advertising effectiveness through attention, persuasion, and recall than TV, the medium where the model has been applied for over half a century.
Nonconscious processing and the online experience
Nonconscious processes and outcomes are fully activated by online experiences as well. Low-attention processing, priming, and implicit memory all operate alongside conscious processes as consumers engage in online experiences. Website designers and online advertisers need to understand how these processes influence consumer attitudes and behaviors in order to maximize online effectiveness and web experience satisfaction.
An example of these processes at work is provided in a 2008 article titled "Unconscious Processing of Web Advertising" (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dir.20110/abstract). Using a clever experimental design (see the nearby sidebar), author Chan Yun Yoo showed that conscious attention to online ads was not necessary in order for those ads to have an impact on participants' memory, attitudes, or later brand selection behavior. Specifically, the study produced three main findings:
Consumers who experienced online ads nonconsciously demonstrated observable priming effects caused by implicit memory of the ads.
Consumers built more favorable attitudes toward advertised brands, regardless of whether they experienced online ads consciously or nonconsciously.
Consumers who experienced online ads nonconsciously were more likely to select the advertised brand on a next-day brand choice task than were those who had no exposure to the ad (the control group).
This study was one of the first to show conclusively that nonconscious processing of web ads was real, that it could occur in the absence of any conscious awareness of seeing the ad, and that it could lead to positive effects on brand attitudes and purchase intentions.
In an online world in which the average banner-ad click-through rate is less than 0.2 percent and the average eye-tracking result shows literally no attention paid to online ads, these results represent good news. By recognizing and measuring other ways that online ads can influence consumers, neuromarketing provides a more realistic picture of how online efforts really work. Using these new techniques, advertisers and marketers can better understand how ad impressions influence consumers above and beyond explicit memory and click-through behavior.
Satisfying (Almost) All Our Needs Online
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the Internet has changed almost every aspect of our daily lives. Here are three of the biggest areas of change, and how they’re impacting online marketing and website experiences:
How we search: Unlike TV, which provides a passive entertainment experience, the Internet is basically an information acquisition medium. Just about everything we do online involves acquiring, evaluating, or comparing information, and this can have profound implications for how marketing and advertising work.
How we share: The rise of social-networking sites has created many new ways to communicate with old friends and make new ones — it has even turned the word friend into a verb. People can share and align their likes and goals with their friends more easily than ever before, creating both opportunities and challenges for marketers.
How we buy: For just about any type of product, the Internet can dissolve the lag time between marketing and buying. On the web, the store is the ad, and the ad is the store. The need for marketing to create memories is diminished, and the opportunities for marketing to create immediate goal satisfaction are increased.
Online search and limitless information
The Internet has changed our relationship with information. In the old days (say, pre-1995), people used to get their information from aggregators who selected the information for them. Each aggregator was a destination where information was prepared by an arcane process called editing. People selected the aggregators they preferred — newspapers, magazines, the evening news — because they trusted those aggregators to give them the information they needed. Information gathering was largely a passive affair. People didn’t normally search for information; they consumed what they were offered.
In the online world, passive consumption of information has been replaced by active search. The old aggregators are becoming endangered species as newspaper and magazine subscriptions decline and traditional evening news viewership shrinks. Search engines like Google and Bing put limitless information at people’s disposal. This is changing not just the amount of information available, but the way in which people interact with that information.
Search, like most other online tasks, is active and goal driven. Researchers have found that people approach searching for information online in a manner very similar to how animals forage for food in the wild. They no longer rely on trusted information sources. Every website they encounter is a potential information patch that they rapidly evaluate for the quality and amount of information it offers relative to their goals. As people become more expert at this foraging behavior, many of the clues and cues they use to make their evaluations become automatic and nonconscious.
Both website design and online advertising effectiveness depend on identifying and understanding how this new process of information foraging operates in practice. It’s very different from the passive information gathering techniques consumers used in the pre-Internet era. Explicit intentions and consciously pursued tasks are central to information foraging, but nonconscious processes that occur rapidly and automatically play a key role as well, making this a research area ready-made for an integrated blend of traditional and neuromarketing techniques.
Social networking and limitless sharing
The Internet has also changed how we relate to other people, making a significant impact on how we share and how we form preferences. In the old days, advertisers enjoyed simple one-way communications with their consumers, with the nature and timing of those communications under their direct control. The first-generation Internet changed all that by making it incredibly easy to establish two-way communications between advertisers and consumers, with control now shifting back and forth between the two. Life got more complicated.
Then along came social networking to add a third player (actually, a network of players) to the situation — a wide range of friends and acquaintances who are in essentially instantaneous communication with each other, and who seem to have an insatiable desire to document and share every detail of their lives, including who they like, what they like, where they go, and what they buy.
Neuroscientists have recently learned something that should be unsurprising to dedicated Facebook users: Talking about ourselves to others is intrinsically rewarding. It activates the same reward circuitry in our brains as eating, receiving money, and having sex. Social-networking sites have tapped into this deep propensity in human nature, giving each of us a virtual soapbox to share our most intimate thoughts with hundreds, if not millions, of people.
The impact of all this sharing on marketing and advertising is to make the processes of persuasion and choice much more complicated. As the number of choices we face every day multiplies, and as our ability to access the preferences of our trusted peers online becomes easier, the messages we receive from advertisers and marketers become less relevant to how we decide. Some commentators have gone so far as to speculate that choice in the social-networking world of the future will become more mimicry than decision making.
Copying the behavior or decisions of others is a strategy that appeals to our cognitive miser brains. Whether we copy the preferences of known friends or people in general, the net effect will be a less predictable world, in which what is popular is popular because it is popular, not because of its intrinsic qualities, brand reputation, or unique selling proposition. At a minimum, this is a world in which the power of brand loyalty may be weakened by the power of social conformity.
Online shopping and limitless choice
One of the unique characteristics of online marketing is the disappearing gap between advertising and buying. An additional aspect of this development is the explosion of choice in the online marketplace. Pick just about any product in any category, and the Internet offers not only the opportunity to immediately buy that product, but a limitless array of offers to choose from, plus interactive tools to compare any offer with any other.
A simple search for toaster ovens, for example, yields over 6,000 results, with options to sort and compare by availability, price, brand, cooking method, size, features, and retail store. In addition, the results page helpfully suggests several related product categories to consider, including toasters, microwave ovens, sandwich makers, waffle irons, and drip coffee makers. Given this overabundance of choice available at our fingertips, the question naturally arises: How does limitless choice impact our human capacity to make decisions?
Social psychologists and decision scientists have begun looking at this question, and the results show that excessive choice can have several implications for consumer decision making:
Decision avoidance: When confronted with too much choice, consumers often choose not to choose.
Reliance on habits: Habitual buying gives shoppers a way to avoid complex choices by relying on selections that have worked in the past.
Reliance on others: People become more dependent on the opinions of others when they can’t disentangle complex choices on their own.
Decreased self-control: When consumers do make complex choices, the process is mentally exhausting, often resulting in willpower depletion (see Chapter 7), less self-control, and greater impulsiveness.
Greater dependence on heuristics: In a state of willpower depletion, consumers are more likely to rely on heuristics that bypass rational System 2 decision-making capabilities (see Chapter 8).
In summary, limitless online choice places significant burdens on our human decision-making abilities. Faced with too much choice, we tend to avoid choice altogether, or revert to implicit System 1 decision making. This is a challenging situation, but one that gives website designers an opportunity to develop decision support tools that simplify complex choice and return choice control to consumers. Indeed, this is an area where neuromarketers and website designers can combine forces to provide real value to online shoppers, as well as online retailers, marketers, and advertisers.
How to Use Neuromarketing to Test Online Experiences and Marketing Effectiveness
Neuromarketing has not been applied extensively to the study of online marketing and web experience. Some commentators have expressed the view that neuromarketing is overkill for understanding online activity. We disagree, and in this chapter we give numerous examples of how nonconscious processes, emotional markers, priming, implicit memory, and intuitive choice significantly impact online behavior. Over time, we expect neuromarketing methods to become more prominent research tools for both online marketing researchers and website designers.
Testing online ad effectiveness
Eye tracking is indispensible for online ad testing, but it isn’t a complete solution. First, it doesn’t track peripheral vision, so it misses ad impressions that occur outside the central gaze pattern. Second, eye tracking can’t tell why a viewer is focusing on a particular area of a web page. Supplementary methods, such as the following, need to be used to assess whether gaze fixations are a function of positive or negative emotional responses:
Facial expression analysis: Synchronizing changes in observable facial expressions with gaze fixations can provide clues as to the direction of emotional responses.
Electromyography (EMG): At a more precise level, involuntary activation of the “frown” and “smile” muscles can reliably indicate whether a fixation is associated with positive or negative emotions.
Direct brain response methodologies, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), may be less useful for online ad testing, because they require more elaborate experimental procedures to separate ad effects from the effects of other elements on a web page. They also tend to be more expensive and time consuming.
Because alignment with consumer intent is central to the effectiveness of online ads, viewer intent needs to be built into ad-testing designs. This may require incorporating both implicit and explicit measures, such as implicit memory tests and measures of explicit attitudes, behaviors, and intentions.
Testing website ease of use
Eye tracking, EMG, and facial recognition have all been used successfully to test website experiences in conjunction with traditional methods like video recording and talk-aloud. Because testing can cover long periods of time, EEG and fMRI are typically impractical due to comfort issues.
Website testing, like online ad testing, should be done in relation to an explicit goal or task to yield meaningful results.