Chapter 3

Putting Neuromarketing to Work

In This Chapter

Seeing how neuromarketing is being applied in different marketing areas

Recognizing that neuromarketing is about more than just making people buy stuff

Revealing the new perspective neuromarketing provides on how consumers think and act

Neuromarketing is not just a set of scientific ideas. As we show in detail in Part III and in summary in this chapter, neuromarketing is already at work across many of the biggest areas in marketing: branding, product innovation and design, online experience and marketing, shopping and in-store marketing, advertising, and entertainment. In each of these areas, neuromarketing has already begun contributing to a deeper understanding of the drivers of consumer behavior and is offering new insights for improving marketing effectiveness.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of these developments. We leave the details to Part III, where you find a chapter dedicated to each of the topics covered in this overview.

Building Better Brands with Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing and branding were made for each other. Both are fundamentally concerned with how ideas are established and linked in the human mind.

When first exposed to a brand, the mind may create a memory of that exposure. This memory may connect various elements — maybe an advertisement promoting the brand, a product offered under the brand, a package design, or a consumption or usage experience. Whatever elements are stored in memory, they’re connected and together form the brand memory.

When exposed to the brand again, new memories may be stored, expanding the earlier brand memory. Connections may also be made between that brand memory and other memory patterns. For example, when an advertisement shows a brand in the context of a beach holiday, the viewer’s mind may make a connection between the brand and its network of beach holiday memories.

As this process unfolds, the brand memory is shaped and reshaped. As it expands and diversifies, the meaning of the brand changes and diversifies, too.

This process takes place naturally in our minds. In turn, brand marketers want to influence the process by creating exposures that are meant to connect the brand memory with particular values, emotions, capabilities, and so forth. They do this through advertising, product and package innovation, shopper marketing, online engagement, and other means.

The problem for marketers is how to measure brand memory. For example, when a marketing campaign tries to connect the consumer’s brand memory with a particular attribute or quality, marketers want to know if these connections actually exist in the consumer’s mind, or if they’re stronger after an advertising campaign or new product launch.

Neuromarketing is at work in branding research today, helping marketers understand how brand memories are formed, how they can be shaped, and how they’re impacting consumers’ emotions, attitudes, and, ultimately, purchase decisions.

Brands are about connections

Traditionally, marketers have focused only on explicit memories — that is, memories that can be clearly and definitively remembered. This is why most marketers assess the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives by measuring various forms of recall — ad recall, product recall, message recall, and so on. The underlying assumption is that if a consumer can’t recall an exposure to the brand, then the marketing initiative had no impact.

Brain science research tells us that there is another type of memory, called implicit memory. These memories are nonconscious and, thus, inaccessible to recall. But they nevertheless exist in the consumer’s mind and can have a profound impact on how consumers feel about brands and what they choose to buy. The big problem for marketers is that consumers simply aren’t aware of these influences.

Because brand memories form networks with connections to other memories, it’s possible to activate a brand memory by activating a connected memory. For example, if advertising has consistently and over an extended period of time connected a dog-food brand with the idea “We’re for Dogs” (as the brand Pedigree has), we can expect exposure to Pedigree products on the supermarket shelf to remind shoppers of their emotional relationships with their dogs, and connect the brand to those emotions. Alternatively, simply seeing a dog outside the supermarket may prime shoppers to seek out and buy the Pedigree brand.

Making connections like this sounds easy. In reality, it’s not. First, as researchers have discovered, consumers often resist marketing messages. Second, and perhaps more important, competing brands are often all trying to establish similar brand connections in consumers’ minds, often with similar, related brand messages.

How brands impact our brains

Numerous research studies have demonstrated that brands can have a significant, even dominating, impact on the consumption experience. An example often cited for this effect is an experiment in which consumers were asked to taste wine presented in a bottle with a prestige brand label or a budget brand label. When tasting from the budget brand bottle, people rated the tasting experience quite poorly. And when tasting from the prestige brand bottle, they rated the wine quite positively. Of course, the researchers gave them the same wine in both cases, so what they tasted was completely determined by their brand expectations.

Using a neuromarketing approach, the same experiment was repeated with consumers having their brains scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine while they enjoyed their wine. The results were quite stunning: Participants actually experienced the taste of the wine differently when it was presented as a prestige brand instead of a budget brand.

This powerful impact is sometimes called the placebo effect of branding. Like a placebo pill, the brand doesn’t actually change the physical experience, but it does change how consumers react to the experience. Researchers have suggested that this is an example of how people consume concepts rather than just physical products. You may attribute your satisfaction with a product (or the lack of it) to its physical consumption or usage, but in fact, the concept that the consumption experience represents is impacting your response the most.

Why leading brands are so hard to displace

Neuromarketing has been applied to the problem of understanding why upstart brands have such a hard time displacing leading brands in a mature category.

From a neuromarketing perspective, one reason is because leading brands tend to have a much more diverse and highly connected brand memory network. Because the leading brand “comes to mind” more easily when the category is considered, it can benefit from activation from many angles, even from exposure to lesser brands in the category.

Leading brands benefit from a virtuous cycle of usage reinforcement. The leading brand

Is familiar, so consumers tend to trust it

Offers a shortcut to decision making that doesn’t require consumers to spend time and effort to make a choice

Reduces risk

Is likely to create a positive consumption or usage experience because consumers expect it to do so

At the same time, the leading brand is more likely to get extensive retail exposure, better product placement, more editorial media coverage, more recommendations by sales staff, and greater promotional activities by retailers and brand owners. All this adds up to more exposure to the consumer, which in turn reinforces the brand’s familiarity and strength of preference.

Finally, because the leading brand is often bought without giving it much thought, it’s a prime candidate for habitual buying.

Such a bundle of benefits is hard to beat. Yet, every so often we see an “upstart” brand doing just that. What’s the secret to a successful challenge and overthrow of a leading brand?

Although leading brands tend to benefit from implicit decision making that favors repeat purchases, the challenger brands can benefit by shifting consumers from implicit to explicit decisions. The challenger brand aims at changing behavior, and the most promising way to do that is to stand out, attract attention, present a compelling argument as to why the brand should be considered, and preempt any counterarguments that may come to consumers’ minds when they analyze the claims made.

Using neuromarketing to test brands

Some of the neuromarketing methods and approaches we mention in this chapter will be unfamiliar to you (for more information, read Chapters 16 through 18). For now, we suggest you just scan the “Using neuromarketing . . .” sections in this chapter to get a sense of the variety of new approaches offered by neuromarketing. You can catch up on the details later.

Testing brands with neuromarketing focuses on three aspects of consumer response:

Associations: Brands are defined by the richness and diversity of their connections in the consumer’s mind.

Emotions: Emotions drive the consumer either toward the brand or away from the brand.

Motivations: Exposure to brands can activate conscious and nonconscious goals in the consumer’s mind that motivate actions.

Neuromarketing provides several ways to measure brand associations. Some of these approaches (such as semantic priming and the Implicit Association Test) measure behavioral responses; others (such as fMRI and electroencephalography [EEG]) measure changes in brain states that accompany activating strong associations in memory.

Emotions are hard to measure with traditional verbal reporting, but several approaches to measuring emotional responses to brands are used by neuromarketers, including affective priming, electromyography (EMG), and facial expression analysis.

Motivational goal activation by brands can be measured by neuromarketers using behavioral studies (measuring the behavioral consequences of brand priming) and brain measures (such as EEG measurement of approach-avoidance motivations).

Designing Better Products and Packages with Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing has been applied extensively in product and package design, in part because people find it very hard to articulate why they like or don’t like a design, and in part because people are very poor predictors of their future buying behavior. Neuromarketing can help marketers and product designers answer three questions:

How do new products get noticed?

What makes a product or package attractive?

Why do so many new products fail, and what can be done about it?

How new products get noticed

When developing new products or packaging, the first thing marketers must do is find the right balance between two basic aspects of the design: novelty and familiarity. Most consumers are attracted to novelty because our brains are naturally curious and on the lookout for new things. But too much novelty overwhelms us and may lead to rejection of a new product if it isn’t familiar enough for us to see how it would meet our needs. So, we’re also drawn to familiarity because it provides feelings of comfort, confidence, and understanding.

The key to getting noticed for a new product is finding the “sweet spot” between novelty and familiarity that provides differentiation from existing products in the category but also provides assurance that the new product meets the consumer’s emotional expectations. In brain science terms, this means focusing on certain aspects of attention and emotion:

Differentiation can be measured by the extent to which a product triggers bottom-up attention (involuntary attention that isn’t consciously directed by the viewer) when viewed in a context of competing products.

Emotional response can be measured by the extent to which the product elicits positive emotional reactions, which can be invoked either directly (by shape, color, form, symbolism, or other signals) or indirectly (through priming, processing fluency, or nonconscious emotional markers).

For more on these terms, turn to Parts II and III of this book. For a quick introduction to some of the key scientific concepts, check out Chapter 24.

Neurodesign of everyday things

Project and package designers, marketers, and graphic and industrial designers can learn a lot from neurodesign (a subfield of neuroscience and social psychology). Neurodesign explores how and why our brains are attracted to some designs more than others, and why we perceive some features as naturally more aesthetically pleasing than others.

What scientists have found is that some aesthetic responses seem to be universal and “hard-wired” into our brains. For example, people seem to have a natural preference for curved lines and edges compared to straight lines and pointy edges. We also tend to prefer designs that are simple, symmetrical, and have high contrast.

Another important source of attractiveness is processing fluency (the ease with which an object can be identified and understood by our brains). When processing fluency is high, consumers don’t need to engage in deliberative thinking; they can process the object (such as a package or product) and make sense of it without a lot of conscious thought.

Processing fluency has been found to improve not only by the design itself, but also by the way in which the design is presented. Repeated exposure (familiarity again), pattern predictability, typicality (the extent to which a design represents an average or ideal for a category), and priming all contribute to processing fluency.

Neuromarketing and new product innovation

Why do so many new products fail? Neuromarketing tells us there are two underlying problems:

People are terrible at predicting what they’ll do in the future.

People are attracted to the novelty of new products, but they’re a little bit uncomfortable with that novelty.

Behavioral economics, one of the disciplines underlying neuromarketing, has addressed the first problem. The conclusion of the behavioral economists has to do with the idea of accessibility (see Chapter 2). When we imagine what we might do in the future, we pick things that are easily accessible in our minds. Unfortunately, this is often a poor basis for a prediction, and we often end up being hopelessly wrong. And those bad predictions get passed on to market researchers in focus groups, surveys, and interviews.

The second problem takes us back to the idea of novelty, and in particular the question of how our brains typically respond to novelty: We’re attracted to it, but we tend to distrust it. The reason for this is often explained in evolutionary terms.

Imagine our ancestors, wandering around in a hostile environment full of dangers. Anything that aided survival in that environment would get passed down from one generation to the next. One thing that clearly aided survival was noticing new things in the environment. But new things often tended to be threatening, like a predator lurking in the tall grass. So, we learned to be vigilant about any changes in our environment, and to direct our attention toward novelty, but also to be on alert and a little bit edgy when we encountered it.

Those propensities appear to have been passed down to our modern brains, even though we operate in a vastly different environment. They show up as a natural inclination to react negatively to new things, despite being attracted to them in the first place.

When you combine poor predictability and a tendency to dislike new things, you get a high likelihood that people aren’t going to be able to tell you what they’ll like in the future.

What are product innovators to do? Neuromarketing says the best approach is to combine moderate levels of innovation with recognizable elements of familiarity. Take the Apple iPad, for example. It’s a novel product in many ways, but it also has familiar features. It’s similar to a computer, so anyone familiar with a computer will find it familiar. It also incorporates elements of other familiar processes, such as the ability to turn pages on the screen with the same gesture we use to turn pages in a magazine.

Marketing and advertising can play an important role in helping consumers make sense of a new product, highlighting how it can be used and how it can satisfy the consumer’s needs and goals, including nonconscious goals the consumer may not even be aware he or she has. The challenge is not only to position the product as a true novelty but also to create a familiar context and establish connections with pre-existing needs and goals.

Using neuromarketing to test new product ideas

New product and package designs need to attract visual attention. Most neuromarketers use eye tracking to test for visual attention, because it provides a precise record of where and when visual attention is directed. Eye tracking also allows the measurement of pupil dilation, which can be a good indicator of emotional arousal while viewing an object.

Eye tracking needs to be integrated with specific tasks in order to be useful. If people are just staring passively at an image, eye-tracking patterns will be unrelated to what people would do in a real shopping situation. Giving study participants a task — like finding the new product on a crowded shelf full of competing products — provides a common baseline against which the eye-tracking results can be evaluated.

Another methodology that is becoming popular in product and package research is forced choice testing. Alternative designs with variations in one or two design elements (such as color of a label or size of a bottle) are presented on a computer screen, and viewers need to rapidly select the one they like the best. The rapid choice requirement forces people not to think too much and, thus, decreases the role of conscious deliberation.

Finally, these behavioral methods can be combined with brain or body measures to assess the underlying mental mechanisms involved. Combining eye tracking with EEG or fMRI, for instance, can provide additional insights into whether fixations are associated with engagement or confusion.

Creating Effective Ads with Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing offers a very different perspective on advertising research than is found in traditional research methodologies. This new perspective embraces new answers to what might be called the three fundamental questions of advertising research:

What is the purpose of advertising?

How does advertising achieve its purpose?

How can we best measure advertising effectiveness?

According to the traditional view, the purpose of advertising is to persuade a consumer to buy a product. It does this by providing a logical argument that will be remembered later when the consumer is in a store or other buying situation. The process occurs completely at the conscious level of the consumer’s brain, and is fully accessible for later recall, so the consumer can accurately convey to a researcher exactly how and why the ad’s persuasive message contributed to the consumer’s decision to buy.

The neuromarketing perspective takes a different view. According to most neuromarketers, the purpose of advertising is to create an emotional connection to a brand, which then gets translated into a sale when those brand connections get activated at the point of sale. Much of this process occurs at a nonconscious level in the consumer’s brain, and as a result the consumer can’t accurately report exactly how his or her purchase decision was influenced by the ad.

In the traditional view, advertising achieves its purpose through conscious processes of persuasion and recall, which are a function of attention, logic, and explicit learning. In the neuromarketing view, advertising achieves its purpose mostly through nonconscious processes: creating positive associations with a brand, repetitive conditioning, and implicit learning.

Each view presents a very different path to advertising effectiveness and, therefore, makes different recommendations for how to measure it. In this book, we call these two paths the direct route and the indirect route to advertising effectiveness:

The direct route measures effectiveness in terms of conscious attention, logical persuasion, recall, and sales.

The indirect route measures effectiveness in terms of nonconscious emotional connections, priming, implicit memory, brand attitudes, and sales.

Neuromarketers don’t claim that the indirect route is correct for all ads and all situations. The direct route is still best for new products that don’t have strong brand identities and need to be explained to begin capturing market share. The direct route is also good for direct solicitation or call-to-action advertising, when the purpose of the ad is to persuade the viewer to take some action, like make a donation or “call immediately” to buy the advertised product.

The direct route: Impacting the sale directly

The direct route to advertising reflects the assumptions of the rational consumer model (see Chapter 2). According to this view, consumers are rational, logical, and fully conscious decision makers. So, the best way to reach them is to grab their attention, capture their interest, trigger their desire, and prompt an action, the purchase of the advertised product.

There are a number of difficulties with this model that we discuss at length in Chapter 11:

People don’t normally pay much attention to advertising.

When people think about advertising claims, they tend to resist them.

People show little evidence of thinking about an ad when shopping.

People are usually unable to recall specific aspects of an ad.

Advertising in general has very little impact on sales.

These challenges to the direct route model do not invalidate it. But they do indicate that it’s less applicable than researchers used to think it was.

The indirect route: Changing and reinforcing attitudes toward the brand

The indirect route to advertising effectiveness is more in line with the intuitive consumer model (see Chapter 2). Advertising is believed to impact sales indirectly by changing attitudes, shaping the consumer’s brand memory, and activating nonconscious goals, which then get fulfilled at the point of purchase. Essentially, advertising builds brand equity, and brand equity drives purchase behavior.

Conditioning, an implicit learning process that creates a positive emotional connection with the brand, is central to this process. Because conditioning works through repetition and low-attention processing, it’s important to expose the viewer to the ad multiple times while minimizing the amount of conscious attention directed toward the ad. After conditioning has occurred, the positive emotional connections can be activated at the point of sale, influencing the consumer’s purchasing behavior.

Research has shown that the indirect route works best for familiar brands, when the product is inexpensive and purchased frequently, and when the ad presents an emotionally engaging narrative in which the brand plays a central role.

Using neuromarketing to test advertising

The best use of neuromarketing in advertising is to test the effectiveness of indirect-route advertising, which largely operates below the level of conscious awareness and, thus, cannot be tested using the self-reporting measures of traditional advertising research.

Neuromarketing techniques commonly used in advertising research include

Eye tracking and EEG brain-wave measurement to track attention

EMG to track momentary emotional reactions by measuring micro-movements of facial muscles

Facial-recognition software to track and measure the intensity of observable facial expressions while watching an ad

EEG to measure approach and avoidance emotional reactions by identifying brain-wave patterns associated with each response

Understanding the Mind of the Shopper with Neuromarketing

Shopping is a complex experience that begins with goals and expectations in the mind of the shopper and ends with a decision to buy or not to buy. In between, it’s a physical experience that involves navigating through physical space, activating all our senses, and weighing lots of alternatives.

Shopping can be, and often is, a pleasurable experience. It harkens back to our early days of hunting and gathering. In many ways, our evolutionary background has optimized our minds for shopping. We’re experts at finding our way through landscapes to acquire things we want and need. We’re driven to meet our bodies’ basic needs, like food and warmth. Not only are we good at shopping, but we draw intense satisfaction from achieving our goals.

Shopper research is a natural fit for neuromarketing methods, because shopping involves many of the mental processes that are central to the neuromarketing perspective:

Our ability to notice novelty and familiarity

Our motivation to approach things that are rewarding and avoid things that are not

Our tenacity to pursue goals in the face of obstacles and interruptions

Our ability to choose rapidly among alternatives

Understanding the mind of the shopper

Shopping is a multisensory experience that engages the mind of the shopper more effectively when all five senses are activated in a consistent manner. Retailers are beginning to appreciate the power of sensory cues and are using neuromarketing studies to tune their environments across all five senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound. Researchers are finding that adjustments in the sensory “landscape” of a retail environment can have a significant impact on both shopper satisfaction and purchase behavior, even when the shopper is unaware of the changes that have been made.

Neuromarketing also highlights the importance of goal pursuit in the mind of the shopper, with studies showing how different goals can lead to vastly different shopping experiences. For example, shoppers often make a distinction between doing the shopping, when they see shopping as a chore, and going shopping, when they see shopping as a pleasurable recreational experience. The goals being pursued in these contexts are quite different, and retailers need to provide quite different experiences to satisfy the shopper’s expectations and needs in each case.

A final element in understanding the mind of the shopper is the impact of consumer personality, temperament, and behavioral style on shopping behavior. Psychologists have known for some time that people have different predispositions in how they behave — some of us are more impulsive, more cautious, more outgoing, and so on. Recently some of these categorizations have been applied to consumers, and interesting variations in shopping styles have been identified. Knowledge of consumer styles is another tool retailers can use to fine-tune their environments to meet the needs of their customers.

Making stores more brain-friendly

Retailers can influence three aspects of shopping to make their stores more brain-friendly. All three can benefit from neuromarketing insights and can be assessed with neuromarketing methods:

Finding: Stores need to help shoppers find what they’re looking for, as well as discover new things that they may not be looking for.

Choosing: Stores need to make it easy for shoppers to choose among alternatives. Many sales may be lost if the choice task is too daunting for the consumer.

Paying: Stores need to help shoppers overcome the pain of paying. Some shoppers feel this pain more than others, but all shoppers feel it.

Finding

To support finding, the retailer’s resources include the store layout, displays, imagery, promotions, activations (such as an in-store taste testing), and, most important, how merchandise is displayed on the shelf.

These elements act as primes, impacting the consumer’s attention, emotional associations, and shopping decisions. The retailer’s strategy may be to focus on creating a particular image by distributing themes, symbols, and triggers throughout the store to guide the shopper and activate desired goals and impressions, such as a grocery store creating a rustic produce department with timber, barrels, and stacked wooden boxes to prime produce buying by suggesting the market’s produce is “fresh from the farm.”

The theming of retail environments attempts to prime broader emotional goals, such as feeling important, pampered, superior, clever, cared for, smart, responsible, and so forth. But the same principles apply when it comes to specific product categories or individual products. The retailer can use a wide range of primes in displays, the way pricing information is expressed, the context around the product being marketed, scent, sound, touch, and, depending on the product under consideration, even taste.

Choosing

To support choosing, stores need to balance the needs of convenience-oriented shoppers and recreation-oriented shoppers. The convenience shopper wants to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible with as little choice as possible. Her purchasing behavior can be easily disrupted if anything gets in the way of her habitual shopping patterns.

In contrast, consumers engaging in recreational shopping generally like variety. But variety needs to be carefully managed to avoid choice overload (presenting too many choices so the shopper is overwhelmed and ends up choosing nothing). For example, putting products in categories makes choice easier, even if the categories are meaningless. Shoppers may be overwhelmed by 30 varieties of tops all laid out in a single display, but have no trouble choosing if those same tops are grouped into six bins labeled A through F.

Several other techniques for simplifying choice in shopping situations are discussed in Chapter 12.

Paying

To minimize pain of paying, retailers have several options at their disposal. In general, any tactic that creates psychological distance between buying and paying helps minimize the pain of paying. This is a fundamental principle behind the credit card — the bill doesn’t arrive until the end of the month. Layaway plans, “no payments for three months” plans, or other credit arrangements achieve similar effects. Pain of payment can also be lessened by offering ways to undo a sale, such as a money-back guarantee. Finally, pain can be minimized by tying the payment to a reward for paying, such as frequent-flyer miles or discounts on future purchases.

Using neuromarketing to test shopping environments

Because the outcome of shopping is behavior — to buy or not to buy — researchers are particularly interested in measuring observable outcomes of the shopping experience, such as what consumers buy, where they buy it, when, and for how much.

In the retail environment, whatever is going to influence buying outcomes has to be seen or otherwise experienced by the shopper. This is why two types of testing are most prominent in in-store shopper research:

Behavioral testing: For example, presenting consumers with choice scenarios while varying situational factors like price and shelf position

Eye tracking: Measuring where consumers are looking in the aisle, at the shelf, and when examining individual products

For some methodologies, measuring free-roaming shoppers presents data-collection challenges. For example, EEG brain-wave recordings are very sensitive to muscle movement, so measuring people walking around, turning their heads, bending over to pick up products, and so on, adds significant noise to the recording, which takes time and effort to remove in post-processing.

As an alternative to in-store measurement, some neuromarketers offer in-lab testing that simulates aspects of the shopping experience in a more controlled environment. Eye tracking can be conducted with images of store shelves, and behavioral tests can be performed with images rather than actual product displays. Study participants also can watch video depictions of shopping experiences in the lab. Because participants remain stationary, technologies like EEG can be used to probe into deeper mental responses, such as variations in attention, emotion, and memory. Constructing virtual reality shopping environments is another new development that holds promise for making shopping studies in the lab both more realistic and more controlled.

Appealing to Brains Online with Neuromarketing

The Internet is something new (at least for our brains, which evolved in a world of physical reality). Neuromarketing is something new. You’d think that these two new things would’ve gotten together, but so far, neuromarketing hasn’t been applied to online topics nearly as much as it has been applied to more traditional topics, like TV advertising and in-store shopping. We suspect that this is beginning to change, as neuromarketing methods become more tuned to the unique features of the online world.

Going online: Something new for the old brain

The human brain has absorbed many new communication technologies over the millennia: language itself, writing and reading, photography, film, and TV, to name a few. But the Internet includes and goes beyond these revolutionary modes of communication in three important ways that have profound effects on marketing:

The Internet has greater interactivity and enables greater control. Traditional media experiences tend to be passive, while online experiences typically are more active and goal directed. When you watch TV, listen to the radio, or leaf through a magazine, you’re usually doing so to relax and unwind by immersing yourself in an imagined world in which you’re not the active player. However, when you go online, it’s usually to get something done: to find some piece of information, to interact with somebody, or to buy something.

In most online activities, specific goals are activated, and the extent to which these goals are easily achieved can have a big impact on whether the activity is perceived as a success or a failure. For example, when shopping online, people judge the experience as much by the ease of navigation and searching as by the eventual outcome of making a purchase or not.

Interactivity and control are two aspects of online experiences that can have a big impact on overall satisfaction and likely future behavior (such as returning to a website or not). Researchers have found that interactivity doesn’t operate in a simple “more is better” manner. Too little interactivity does, indeed, cause a website to appear boring and static, but too much interactivity can also have a negative effect if it’s too taxing on the viewer’s cognitive resources. A similar result has been found for control features. Both too little and too much control can be off-putting.

The Internet allows unprecedented alignment of advertising with tasks and goals. The ability to align advertising with a person’s wants and needs at a precise moment is something that has eluded advertisers in more passive media. But in the online world, with so much information passing back and forth between the user and the website, and complex content selection algorithms churning away in the background, placing aligned ads on the website in real time becomes very feasible. In Chapter 13 we discuss how this new capability changes ideas about advertising effectiveness for online ads.

The value of aligned online advertising is supported by the fact that the most aligned type of online advertising — those little search ads that show up on a search results page based on what you type into the search box — are the most popular form of online advertising, consistently accounting for almost half of all expenditures advertisers make online.

The Internet eliminates the delay between marketing and buying. The Internet enables companies to turn an ad into an immediate sale, with no time delay in between. One key implication for marketing and neuromarketing is that creating a lasting memory is no longer such an important purpose for an ad. Also, as online marketing experiences become full-blown sales experiences, testing of online marketing needs to encompass choice and action outcomes, as well as attention and emotional responses.

There are some risks for consumers in this development. Nonconscious goal activation may become an even more prominent source of buying motivation, and impulsive buying may become harder to resist when the old “cooling-off period” between offer and sale has vanished.

Building the perfect website

Neuromarketing can make a contribution to website design in three powerful ways:

By helping designers understand how people’s brains actually consume web pages: Eye tracking applied to website viewing has shown that gaze patterns are determined by two types of attention:

• Bottom-up attention: This type of attention is involuntary and automatic. When viewing websites, bottom-up attention is attracted to certain types of features, such as brightness relative to background, distinct borders, the center of the viewing area, and tight groupings of objects on the page. These reactions are automatically produced by the brain’s visual processing system and can be predicted at an 80 percent accuracy rate by software.

• Top-down attention: This type of attention is driven by the viewer’s goals and expectations. Following the first few moments of scanning, which are controlled by the automatic attention system, goals take over to determine where the viewer will look next and for how long.

This dependence on goals means that web pages should not be thought of as having some objective level of “effectiveness.” Web page and website effectiveness can only be determined relative to the goals and expectations that viewers bring to the page.

By providing clues regarding the major sources of website frustration: Studies have shown that website frustration usually occurs when the viewer’s goals and expectations are impeded by the web page’s organization, task flow design, or goal-irrelevant clutter (usually advertising) around the page. These disruptions of goal pursuit can occur at the nonconscious level, and they can significantly impact the viewer’s attitudes and behavior, often without the viewer being aware of the real sources of his or her responses.

By helping designers understand how nonconscious processing impacts online experiences: Although tasks and goals on websites are predominantly conscious in origin and pursuit, nonconscious processes continue to play an important role in website viewing. Website designers and online advertisers need to understand how low-attention processing, priming, and implicit memory all operate alongside conscious processes in order to design online experiences that maximize online effectiveness and web experience satisfaction.

Satisfying (almost) every need online

The Internet raises some interesting issues with regard to how it enables us to satisfy some of our most basic human needs in ways that were impossible before it came along. Three such changes are discussed in Chapter 13:

How we search for information: Just about everything we do online involves acquiring, evaluating, or comparing information with an ease that was unthinkable a few years ago.

How we share: People can now share and align their likes and goals with their friends more easily than ever before.

How we buy: On the web, the store is the ad, and the ad is the store. The lure of immediate gratification has never been presented so strongly.

Each of these new capabilities has already had significant repercussions. The replacement of passive consumption of information by active search has led to the decline of many traditional information “destinations,” such as newspapers, magazines, and the evening news. The ease with which people can share preferences and tastes on social-networking sites has changed the drivers of persuasion and choice that marketers have relied on for decades. And the limitless choice of online shopping has raised issues of choice overload that place significant new burdens on our human decision-making capabilities.

The long-term implications of these radical changes are as yet unknown.

Using neuromarketing to test online experiences

Eye tracking, EMG, and facial recognition have all been used to test website usability. As website designers seek out more integrated solutions for testing both the conscious and nonconscious drivers of online experience, we expect to see increasing use of neuromarketing techniques in conjunction with traditional methodologies such as video recording and direct observation.

Neuromarketing has not been employed extensively in the study of online marketing and advertising. One challenge is that direct brain response methodologies like EEG and fMRI have not yet developed robust procedures for separating ad effects from the effects of other elements on a web page. Another challenge is the inclusion of consumer tasks and goals, which are not as well integrated into neuromarketing approaches as they need to be.

Producing Compelling Entertainment with Neuromarketing

Entertainment is not directly a part of marketing. It’s a self-contained experience, which is to say it provides its own reward. Marketing, in contrast, may be entertaining, but its real purpose is outside itself. Its job is to influence attitudes and behavior beyond the marketing experience itself.

So, why are we discussing entertainment in a book about marketing and neuromarketing? Because, through brain science, we have learned that entertainment is a major delivery medium for attitude and behavior change, the heart and soul of marketing. A story is not an obvious persuasive message, but it can persuade people in ways that traditional persuasive messaging cannot. Marketers are catching on to this, and consumers should as well.

Why our brains like stories

Research has shown that a story can activate empathy. Through a system in the brain called mirror neurons, we can feel what characters in the story feel. As the story draws us in, our emotions are connected to the story, suppressing our awareness of our actual surroundings. This causes us to leave reality and enjoy time in the world the story is creating. When we’re transported into this imaginary world, we’re in a highly persuasive state, because our usual defenses against persuasive messages have been, in effect, left back in reality. Our emotional involvement with the reality makes it easier for us to align our own beliefs and evaluations with the story.

Stories can enrich our lives by letting us experience situations we haven’t yet experienced or may never experience. Although the experience is “secondhand,” it’s an experience nevertheless, enriching our lives, creating new memories in our minds, and diversifying existing memories. Importantly, we imagine the risks that the story’s characters need to take, without having to take those risks ourselves.

An effective story not only allows us to feel the emotions of the characters, but also activates other parts of our brains. We may experience smells when we read about coffee, touch when we read about the leathery hands of a villain, or motion when the hero leaps from a speeding train. This is an important insight from neuromarketing research: A story can activate the same areas in the brain that are activated by equivalent real-world experiences.

Brain science tells us our brains make sense of reading about an experience or watching it unfold in a movie by simulating how we would experience it ourselves. This is why neuromarketers sometimes say that the brain responses of people watching an experience are a good indication of the likely brain responses of people actually engaging in that experience.

Neuroscience goes to the movies

A subfield of neuroscience, neurocinematics, studies the impact of movies on the mind. Researchers have found that a well-constructed movie with a strong plot and tightly managed emotional scenes (such as a thriller) synchronizes eye movements and brain activity across an audience of viewers. The more effective the thrills, the more all viewers respond in the same way at the same time. Interestingly, comedies produce less synchronization than thrillers, perhaps validating the comedian’s lament that “comedy is hard, dying is easy.”

Movies can also prime the audience, activate goals, and impact behavior. Research has focused primarily on the dark side of priming, showing how viewing violent movies can be linked to an in increase in aggressive and violent behavior in children and adults. It’s also likely that movies can act as positive primes, leading to altruistic, ethical, and pro-social behavior, but this side of priming has received less attention by researchers.

Movie trailers are mini-movies with a marketing purpose: to get viewers to go see the movie. Traditional researchers test trailers by asking viewers after seeing the trailer if they plan to see the movie. Neuromarketing research can do more. It can deliver insights into nonconscious responses to the trailer, such as impressions of novelty and familiarity, emotional reactions to different scenes, fluctuations in attention and interest, memory formation or activation, approach or avoidance motivation, and audience synchronization.

Product placement in movies, TV shows, and beyond

Product placement has become a prominent form of advertising because it has been shown to produce the kinds of responses marketers love: improved brand favorability, purchase intent, and actual purchase behavior. So, it’s no wonder that we’ve seen a rapid increase in product placements in movies, TV shows, video games, music videos, magazine articles, and elsewhere.

For marketers, the unique benefit of product placement is the fact that the product is presented within a narrative story. The more deeply the viewer is engaged by that story, the less access the viewer will have to deliberative and logical thinking about what he or she is watching. This means the viewer will be more receptive to the ideas presented in the story and less questioning of any claims made or implied as a part of the story. When a product is introduced into the mix, marketers hope it will ride on top of the receptive feelings produced by the story, allowing it to share in the enhanced receptivity to persuasion that the story produces.

The future of entertainment: Immersive games and simulations

Progress in computing power has enabled game designers to create highly realistic and immersive games. Unlike movies, games give the player direct control over the storyline, combining immersion with both control and interactivity. The degree to which the player feels immersed into the game is called presence. Research has shown that adding an engaging story or narrative to a game dramatically lifts presence. In addition, a strong storyline has been found to trigger and enhance emotions, lead to an identification with characters, and lift the player’s overall satisfaction with the game experience.

Immersive gaming has been found to have mixed after-effects. Perceptual skills and hand-eye coordination appear to be enhanced by extensive gaming, but increased aggression and decreased empathy have been observed after deep immersion in violent games.

Using neuromarketing to test entertainment

Entertainment testing — because the focus is on the impact of the experience itself — is more concerned with moment-to-moment measures and, in particular, on how those measures play out over the duration of the experience.

Emotional arousal (intensity of stimulation) is an important indicator of entertainment effectiveness. It can be measured by electrodermal activity (EDA), the production of perspiration on the skin. Emotional valence (liking or disliking) is important as well. Especially over extended periods of time, facial EMG can be used to track valence-related micro-muscle movements from the smile or frown muscles. EMG can also be used to measure tension and stress by placing sensors on neck, shoulder, or jaw muscles.

Technologies that probe more deeply into brain signals, like fMRI and EEG, have been used less widely in entertainment studies. In part, this is because they create a more unnatural and uncomfortable setting for long-duration recording. They’re also more sensitive to body movement, which is a common byproduct of an immersive entertainment experience.