With the influence of market and global economy, business competition is becoming more and more fierce. Every year, marketing managers find out the focus group among consumers, spend millions of dollars to study how this focus group makes decisions, and try their best to use advertising, media or other means to enhance the popularity of their products in order to obtain marketing profits.
However, john wanamaker, a famous department store tycoon, once famously said that he knew that half of his advertising expenditure was wasted, but he didn't know which half. One technique is to use neurological methods to determine the driving force behind consumers' choices-"neuromarketing". Neuromarketing is to use advanced functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to understand and analyze consumers' preferences more accurately, so as to help enterprises provide products and services that better meet customers' needs and carry out more effective advertising. Neuromarketing is not to control consumers' buying behavior, but to change enterprises according to consumers' brain analysis, so that the business marketing activities of enterprises are more targeted. At the critical moment when people make shopping decisions, researchers filmed the effects of their brain activities to reveal their reactions to other advertisements or commodities. This information can be used as the basis for new advertising and brand promotion of enterprises, so that enterprises can "know ourselves and know ourselves" in commercial marketing.
Scientists show photos to volunteers and use MRI scanners to observe their brain activities at this time. Magnetic resonance imaging was originally used in the field of psychology. With the expansion of its application, it has penetrated into everyone's life. In the United States, it has become synonymous with advertising. Nuclear magnetic resonance technology is helpful to better understand consumers' perception, attention, emotion, memory and their interaction. It is recognized by Nielsen Market Research Company as one of the main means of advertising and market research in the future.
First, the comparison of marketing methods
Neuromarketing can be traced back to the prediction made by neuroscientist AntonioDamasio more than ten years ago: people use not only the rational half of the brain, but also the perceptual half when buying. People can use MRI to record blood flow in different areas of the brain. When people buy, a certain area of the brain is activated, which needs more oxygen-containing blood supply to support, and every millisecond blood chart will appear on the MRI scanner. Through magnetic resonance imaging, consumers' cognitive and emotional reactions to advertisements or their memories can be better tracked.
The traditional method is to understand customers' emotional preferences through interviews, surveys or observations. Among them, "focus group" is the most important attitude research tool in advertising industry, and it is also a classic research technology in social science. In the United States, in 2002, merchants spent more than 654.38+0 billion on interviews, and the results of interviews will affect the next 654.38+0.2 billion advertising investment. But the disadvantage of the interview is that people tend to tell you what you want to hear, not what they really think. These methods are all trying to explore the inner feelings of customers through their external performance. If consumers hide their true feelings, then these methods are easy to make mistakes.
The traditional marketing survey methods are questionnaire survey, and consumers are asked to investigate after the advertisement is put in, asking how the advertisement is effective. For example, ask this consumer whether this advertisement has attracted your attention, whether you like this advertisement or not, and whether this advertisement will affect the respondents' views on a company's image. The problem with this traditional survey is that either the consumer doesn't tell you what he really thinks, and even if he does, he doesn't necessarily know what is happening in his subconscious.
Relatively speaking, the scanning comparison of nuclear magnetic resonance can provide a "fact", that is, what you see is what you believe. Under the monitoring of nuclear magnetic resonance, subjects cannot misrepresent their reactions. Neuromarketing can even infer the difference between whether an advertisement only pleases or really arouses the desire to buy, which is exactly what traditional methods such as interviews and questionnaires can't do. At the same time, neuromarketing can also reveal the subconscious needs of the brain, so as to judge what happened in the consumer's subconscious and what kind of influence advertising had on him.
It seems more scientific to study how the brain produces emotional reactions and purchase decisions by using neurological techniques. When consumers feel about a brand, they also mix their emotions, memories and other impressions.
Through research, neuromarketing thinks that consumers' purchasing motives can be divided into two types: positive motivation (consumers want to approach) and negative motivation (consumers try to avoid). For example, consumers buy cola in the hope of getting a good taste, so advertisements are more suitable for joyful and positive emotions and scenes. On the contrary, when patients buy headache medicine, their motivation is to get rid of the pain. In this kind of product advertisements, sad and painful emotions and scenes can often stimulate their desire to buy. Therefore, marketers should pay attention to analyze whether the motivation behind the product purchase process is positive or negative, and then judge what kind of emotions and pictures to use to influence consumers.
Second, the application of neural marketing
Functional magnetic vibration will become a tool for multinational companies to test the effect of product packaging, advertising and other promotional activities. Steven Shi Ying, a neuroscientist at California Institute of Technology, said, "Questionnaire-based market research is based on the assumption that people know their needs. However, this is not entirely the case. The power of neuromarketing lies in its ability to reveal the subconscious needs of the brain. " The research on measuring brand influence and explaining the doubts in advertising industry through neural experiments is in the ascendant. In the summer of 2003, the "Bright House" of the Institute of Thinking Science of Emory University in Atlanta officially opened as a commercial organization. "Smart House" will scan the brains of representative samples of potential consumers of the client company, evaluate their reactions to the company's products and advertisements, and then make corresponding adjustments to the publicity strategies according to the scanning and research results, so as to coordinate the corporate and product images. "Smart House" can be said to be the direct product of this neuromarketing campaign, and its scientific director kells is full of expectations for the future of this science. He believes that neuromarketing research is gradually becoming a part of enterprise decision-making. He even predicted that in the future, many large companies will set up full-time neuroscience departments to provide scientific support for the company's major decisions.
"How to quantify the exposure frequency of sponsor logo on TV" has always been a topic of concern to advertising companies. Before the popularization of computers, advertising companies would hire human teams to count the exposure time of sponsor logo on TV, but this method is not only slow, but also low in accuracy. With the rapid development of computer operation, pattern recognition, which has been developing continuously for 15 years, is gradually maturing. "Pattern recognition" is a technology similar to the scanner's recognition of characters or fingerprints in printed matter, but there is still a theoretical bottleneck (it takes 10 second to identify sponsors' advertisements on a football field from a TV screen). The good news is that Margau Matrix, a consulting firm founded by Joe Sweeney and Steve Burgress's business research institute, announced a breakthrough.
The technical basis of Margo Matrix Consulting Company comes from the simulation of "cognitive research" in the medical field, which simulates the human retina to convert visual images into electronic pulses and send them to the brain analysis and processing program. Founder Bogles claims that their nail net software can identify sponsors' advertisements on six football fields within 1 second (more than 50 times faster than "pattern recognition"), and it is the only computer software that can "analyze the exposure frequency of sponsors in the game broadcast in real time".
So far, neuromarketing has been widely used abroad. For example, scientists in university of ulm, Germany, published a research report on the attractiveness of cars to people: When testers saw expensive and charming sports cars, magnetic resonance imaging scans showed that an area of the brain that responded to the outside world (related to the main emotional center of people) was active.
On September 13, 2006, Professor Rami Zwick, deputy dean of the Business School of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said at the management forum of neuromarketing in Tianyi Book: "neuromarketing studies have been under pressure from many sides." He explained that unlike marketing psychology, neuromarketing can make enterprises see consumers' brains more clearly and manipulate or control consumers' behaviors, which is the main reason why this discipline has been criticized. "Marketers have been doing marketing in the research results of applied psychology for a long time. For example, marketers can measure heart rate. If you are excited, your heart rate will increase. In addition, you can also measure blood pressure. Many psychologists hope to find better marketing methods through this research. "
However, "in our subconscious, many things are happening, and we don't even know ourselves." There are many factors that affect the final decision, even though you may not know what these factors are and what they do. Above the level of brain consciousness, what we see is the tip of the iceberg, but under the iceberg is more subconscious activity. " It is these that will make some marketing psychology achievements have to face the challenge of "seeing flowers in the fog".
"Now through in-depth research, the degree of specialization of neural division of labor in the human brain is very high." One of the foundations of neuromarketing is based on these studies.
Using brain scanning technology, we can image and scan brain activity. When a person is engaged in a specific activity, the relevant parts of the brain are activated or most active, so that we can get some more direct and accurate information, which may not even be known to us because they will be hidden in the depths of the subconscious. With this technology, we can dig deeper into this field, not just detecting blood pressure, but now it has become a very useful tool in marketing research.
Although neuromarketing has become a hot topic, it is also controversial. Chris Fries of the Institute of Neurology in London said: We know very little about how the brain system works. Just because we can find and measure more activities in the brain, it is too early to think that these measurement results are more authoritative than people's own thoughts and feelings; Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Tubingen, Germany, found that although magnetic resonance imaging scanning can accurately provide information about the amount of information entering a certain area of the brain, it cannot indicate what information the rest of the brain has obtained.
Although there are still many questions or puzzles, the prospect of neuromarketing is still attractive, and curiosity will drive us forward and make it gradually become a part of enterprise decision-making.