Neuromarketing: Neurology meets Marketing?

I'm post-graduate in Neuropsychology and a few months ago I was reading a consumer magazine and I saw an article about Neuromarketing and I was curious about what this field really does and studies.

So, I did a research to find out the answers for some questions that came after I read the article:

1. What's Neuromarketing?

2. What technologies do the researchers use?

3. What's the purpose for studying Neuromarketing?


And, it was very interesting what I found out about this new discipline...


1. First of all, Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.

2. By using neuroimaging tools, such as:

• Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain

• Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response,

• Different Sensors to measure changes in one's physiological state like heart rate, respiratory rate and galvanic skin response
  

3. The researchers can learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.

That's no doubt, Neuromarketing came up to help marketing analysts to better measure a consumer's preference.

Although, the verbal response given to the question:

• Do you like this product?

may not always be the true answer due to cognitive bias (is a person's tendency to make errors in judgment based on cognitive factors, motivational factors or social influence).

Even though, this knowledge will certainly help business decision makers to create products and services designed more effectively and marketing promotions campaigns focused more on the brain's response.

Definitely, this makes Neuromarketing and its applied results potentially subliminal. Neuromarketing will tell the marketer what the consumer reacts to, whether it was the color of the packaging, or the sound the box makes when shaken, or the idea that they will have something their co-consumers do not.

Toffler, an American Writer and Futurist, in his book The Third Wave describes three types of societies, based on the concept of waves. Each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside. The Third Wave called Technological Revolution , has taken place since half of the 20th century and continues to the present day, and the main focus is personalization.

For what I've understood of Neuromarketing, I'm sure that today and in the near future it's one of the fields that is strategically designed to understand each client's own individuality and it's focused on delivering a personalized experience.