Marketing is a complex field that requires a deep understanding of consumer behavior. In today’s world, simply knowing who your customers are is not enough. To truly connect with them, it is necessary to understand their thoughts, motivations, and desires. This is where neuromarketing comes into play.

Neuromarketing is the study of how the brain responds to marketing stimuli. It encompasses a range of techniques, including psychometrics, neuro-metrics, and biometrics. By analyzing data from these techniques, marketers can gain valuable insights into what makes consumers tick.

Does this sound like psychology? Neuroscience? The practitioners of psychology will argue that it does. It comes with different names like behavioral marketing, sensory marketing, etc. But let’s sum it up under one umbrella name, ‘Neuromarketing.’ The three essential components of this marketing are Psychometrics, Neuro-metrics, and biometrics. Sounds like sci-fi, isn’t it? How about an example?

Say, you visit a nearby showroom to purchase a washing machine. While waiting for the demonstrator to attend, you notice one of the trending songs playing; you go nearby and watch the entire video song sung beautifully by one of your favorites, Ankit Tiwari. You are moved with happiness, and an ear-to-ear grin is more than visible on your face. That is why we visit supermalls. The cleanliness, nice crowd, availability of all products at a place. You repeat the song inside your mind in a rather awful voice compared to the original and return to your waiting queue. Soon, the demonstrator comes, and you finish your purchase. While paying for the product you notice something tad familiar for a millisecond and then just move on. What did you notice out of the ordinary? Nothing may be?

After roaming for a while, you slowly go to the shopper’s stop, though you didn’t have any plan to go there. You stood near the perfume stall and notice a pretty familiar fragrance (at least that is what your brain said). Was it the reason why you were attracted to that store? The salesgirl quickly intervenes your thought process and you end up buying a perfume with that peculiar fragrance. You feel happy.

I have shared one of the oldest and primitive examples of Neuro-marketing. The fragrance was planted inside your brain while you were waiting for the washing machine demonstration and at the cash counter, which you consciously ignored but your unconscious mind registered and derived you to finally buy that perfume

So, you ended up buying something which you hadn’t plan. The question is, can a subtle change as above, influence our buying decision? Well someone can argue that it’s a hypothetical situation. So, let’s know about something which actually happened and recorded. North, Hargreaves & McKendrick in 1997 played French and German music in a supermarket. Obviously, consumers were not informed about this experiment. To a surprise, French music helped French wine to outsell German wine to a ratio of 5:1. Next day the music was changed to German and German wine outsold French wine to a ratio of 2:1. However, when the consumers were asked whether the background music influenced their buying decision? The answer was ‘NO’. The study took place in 1997 for 2 weeks. While I was watching ‘Shaktimaan’, an Indian TV series with awe, the marketers had already started experimenting with neuroscience in marketing. Just imagine how advance it must be now.

More than often, such marketing does its work without alerting our operative brain. There are many ways thinkers are now imbedding their brand and ideas inside our brain.

There are stages of decision making of a human mind. Prominent Marketers have found ways to disrupt the decision making on every stage by different intensity of marketing. Nearer you are to decision making, more intense is the marketing. Cracking the code of desire and need has helped futuristic thinkers to dilute a complicated process like decision making in simple steps which can be leveraged and tampered with to push an agenda, product, theory or choice. Who can forget what happened in Presidential election in USA in 2016? It’s a case study for marketers like me.

Data science has played a significant role in it. Data gathered from huge sample sizes and analyzing it has enabled them to try different tactics of marketing and influencing in different stages of decision making. By the way, data doesn’t necessarily mean only your name and DOB, its way beyond that. Our expressions, voice, choices, habits, fears, goals…everything. How can they have data of my face? Remember Face-app? According to experts, they have data of over 1.5 million users, scary.

With the help of Data Science and opting the method of trial and error, thinkers have been able to find combination of tactics which have higher chance of working in different stages of decision making.                   

The question is, how are they able to know on which stage our brain is in decision making? Well, we have made this easier by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in our browsing history and cookies. Comparing our past habits at the time of purchase and current state of search, thinkers can calculate the exact stage on which our brain is, in the complicated process of decision making.

Yes, we must thank (or not) the search engines like Google for this. Well, but just gathering intel about consumer mind is only a small percentage of work which is being done through Neuromarketing. Obviously targeting single consumer is not possible, at least till now (soon they will achieve it though). So, currently they are using segmentation marketing by targeting a group of people with similar habits with same kind of ads.

Neuroscience has lot more aspects, making us purchase things which we don’t want is only a small outcome of this dangerous game. They can make us believe on things which doesn’t exist? Its almost evident now that marketing is not only influencing our decision but modelling it. The amalgamation of ‘data’, ‘marketing’, ‘neuroscience’ can give us extreme results like above mentioned ‘Donald Trump winning the election’ or communal riots or terrorism.

Soon, with help of phenomenon like ‘cocktail party effect’, marketers will ask you to do what they want in your voice. Isn’t it scary? But what’s scarier, that they are not even breaking any law by doing this, because there is no law about this.

There are certainly more questions than answers in this part. I will bring answers in my next one, along with how regulators can control this insane privacy invasions in the name of marketing in next part of ‘Neuromarketing’.