Neuromarketing: your brain knows what it wants to buy

The benefits of psychology to our knowledge they are unsuspected. As the decades go by, advances in psychology are used by the sports world, medicine, education, and especially advertising and marketing.

The Neuromarketing It is a relatively new discipline, which tries to create effective marketing campaigns from the knowledge we have about the human mind; specifically, the brain. Does this discipline work? The results may surprise you ...

Neuromarketing: entering the consumer's brain

It all started with the creation of a very simple technology: the biofeedback. For many decades, psychologists try to learn more and more about human behavior and its mental processes by analyzing physiological reactions, such as tension, electrical impulse, sweat, pupillary dilation, etc... This is how biofeedback arises, which consists of, through what we know about those records, making the person learn to relax or to control his state of anxiety by means of a small device that informs him about his physiological state with a sound or light.

It is very simple: the person lies down, puts their fingers on some comfortable sensors that are attached to the small device and hears a high-pitched sound. As you relax, the sound becomes lower and lower and slower. This simple technology is not only used to learn to relax... but for much more. This is when the game comes in. Neuromarketing.

Why are some ad campaigns not working?

Marketers and advertisers were tired of feeling how what was supposed to work in the minds of consumers was not working. Perhaps the problem was that they did not know well enough how the human mind works. They then began to practice neuromarketing.

How? Marketers began to apply knowledge of psychology in their studies, and using technology in sensory records, they decided to study which advertising was most effective on people (using sensors on the test people, such as measuring pupillary response, eye movements, circulation, etc.). The results were very surprising ...

Do the campaigns that tell us that tobacco kills work?

For years there have been campaigns that, with dire and very unpleasant photos on cigarette packs, tell us that smoking kills, causes impotence or can destroy our teeth. However, the number of smokers does not decrease. Is addiction the only culprit? Neuromarketing decided to study this case and discovered something surprising... This advertising increases desires to smoke. The explanation is simple. The researchers showed the photos and messages to both smokers and non-smokers.

The non-smokers found the pictures very unpleasant, and their physiological reactions indicated so. However, these people are not smokers, so they are not really relevant to tobacco use. The curious fact came when smokers saw the images. When reading the word "smoking" and viewing images related to smoke, certain memories were activated in his brain and the desire to smoke increased. Modern technology allowed researchers to demonstrate this.

Advertising that works: Harley Davidson

Harley davidson is a classic motorcycle brand, with a very powerful image, even though they are not the motorcycles that everyone buys. They are very exclusive motorcycles, they are not the fastest or most powerful. However, the image of the brand is quickly associated with freedom, with a way of life, with speed, with personal power.

The researchers wanted to check how powerful was the image of Harley Davidson, which is usually the motorcycle accompanied by a biker with a beard and long hair. The experiment consisted of viewing photographs of various well-known characters, including a biker with his Harley Davidson. The result of the experiment was the following: the Harley Davidson brand awakens the same areas in the brain as when a person visualizes an image of Jesus Christ. The brand has been associated with so much commitment and for so many years to freedom and a detached and genuine way of life, that just by preserving that image they gain followers, whether or not they are motorcyclists.

Neuromarketing, in short, it is a way of bringing scientific advances in psychology closer to disciplines such as marketing, whose main priority is to know people, their tastes, personality and authentic needs. The goal: to make advertising more honest, effective and efficient, that reaches interested people and without breaking into where it is not well received. To achieve this, what we know about our mind is fundamental knowledge.