March 4, 2025
Using Neuromarketing To Drive Deeper Insights
For decades, arguably centuries, we’ve been trying to understand why a consumer buys a particular product, or why a company chooses a supplier for a particular service. In the healthcare world we’ve been trying to understand why a doctor prescribes a certain medication over another.
I was wondering a few years ago how we could drive greater insights into this desire for understanding. From several sources I was hearing an overwhelming desire for research to be more insightful as well as delivered more quickly and efficiently. Desires from marketeers that continue to get stronger every year. At around the same time I was introduced to the subject of neuromarketing techniques. I was almost immediately converted to the power of neuro based techniques in market research.
We tend to rationalize our responses in traditional market research surveys so when we ask research participants why they buy a certain product, say a particular soft drink, many will say for example ‘taste’, ‘price’ or ‘convenience’. Most soft drinks taste nice, are reasonably priced and widely available so that doesn’t give us much to build a differentiating marketing campaign on. Our buying decisions are driven to a great extent by our emotions, and measuring those emotions is far harder - as human beings we either can’t or wont tell you what drives our buying decisions beyond obvious rational responses.
Neurotechniques can get below the level of conscious awareness and drive new insights. Traditionally we’ve relied on qualitative research to explore a deeper understanding of the buyer and decision maker. ‘Traditional’ research techniques can take us a certain distance in better understanding our buying decisions and choices - ethnography for example works well in some situations,and ‘in the moment’ research can be helpful in driving deeper insights. Qualitative research has relied on techniques such a laddering to try and drill down deeplyin to the motivations of the respondent and uncover deeper emotions. Neurotechniques can add a new layer to that understanding.
Neuro based research techniques can help us to better understand the real emotional motivations for buying a particular product or prescribing a particular medicine. And by the way I’m not for one minute dispensing with traditional techniques. On the contrary in my experience using traditional research together with neurobased techniques can drive some really interesting insights. Neuro is another tool in the box to be used where appropriate to drive deeper insights.
Originally when neuro techniques started to make their way into the world of market research we used methods that involved placing caps on the heads of respondents and wiring them to complex machines that could read their emotional responses and levels of engagement with stimuli they were seeing, be it an advert or some new product we were testing. While useful these can be an inefficient and somewhat expensive way of measuring our emotions. Technology and online research mean there are now better more efficient ways of doing this. Eye tracking is another useful development in the neuro tool box now ubiquitous inthe world of research and readily available to help us drive deeper insights into what buyers are looking at and why.
Overall though my favourite technique in the neuro tool box is the Implicit AssociationTest (IAT). I like it because it can smoothly run alongside traditional techniques, easily be done online and is now relatively simple and inexpensive to incorporate into a piece of research. The test is set up to ask the respondents to sort positive and negative associations either words or images(assigned to a left or right key) at a very high speed – without time to think about the responses. The sorting exercise times responses and analysis of these response times then show the real, emotional associations a respondent has with a brand or company. A faster response time indicating a stronger association with the brand or company.
Case Study – Infant Milk Formula
One project I worked on in the highly competitive infant milk formula market used traditional techniques to determine which of several brands were most highly associated with particular brand values; ‘balanced nutrition’ and ‘healthy growth’. Traditional research showed that one particular brand was more associated with those brand claims than all the others.
The neuro research using the same questions showed something quite different. None of the brands were more associated with these brand values than any other brand. The traditional research likely showed the brand concerned as being more associated as at the time there was a lot of advertising and ad spend on that brand, but the reality is that consumers didn’t associate the brand any more with the tested brand values than any other brand. An indication of brand ‘sameness’ with no marketing strategy or brand communications significantly differentiating one brand from another at the time.
This really shows the value of doing traditional and neuro techniques together.
I’ll roundoff with my key thoughts on neuromarketing techniques.
1. Neuro techniques help us to get below the level of conscious awareness, uncover the buyers emotions and drive deeper insights. In turn this helps us to more accurately tune into their motivations so we can adapt our marketing strategies and tactical efforts.
2. Neuro works best when we use traditional techniques and neuro based research together. The contrasting results from the implicit and rational responses really drives some interesting insights and provokes discussion and questions. And all great market research provokes new questions!
3. IATs are a great economical way of testing brand messaging, brand communications and packaging.
Want to find out more about how neurotechniques can enhance your marketing decision making? Contact me scott@smartconnectresearch.com
