Neuromarketing and economic decisions

Dr Senarath TENNAKOON

Advertising is a cost-effective way to disseminate messages, whether it is to build brand preference for a soft drink or to motivate a developing nation's to drink milk or to practise birth control (Kotler,1994).

Advertising is any paid form of non personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsors. The electronic and the print media are used in a variety of ways in the art and science of advertisements. Audio and visual methods either alone or in combination are often used. The marketing managers have to look at the target market and the buyer motives prior to designing a successful advertising programme. They also have to take serious notice about the five 'M's - mission, money, message, media and measurements. The ability to see the behaviour of target human minds at the subconscious level as well as the emotional responses of the prospective clients is a sine-qua non in successful advertising.

Buying consumer items. File photo

In brief, the advertisers should know the basics of neuroscience for neuromarketing. Advertisements act by stimulating the memory of the target audience. There are three physiological aspects of advertisements. Some advertisements are created and displayed to inform the audience of a new product and stimulate the audience for buying it. The second type of advertisements are designed to persuade the buyers and thus build brand preference. We are very familiar with this soft drink advertisements where cricketers are strong images indicating brand preference.

Bill boards

The third variety is to remind the buyers that the brand may be needed in the near future. These advertisements are designed whenever the marketing managers encounter a decline in the sales of a brand product. By such a ‘reminding advertisement' it is hoped that the clients are stimulated to keep the ‘brand’ at the top of mind above the subconscious level. Reminder advertisements are highly relevant in mature products.

Expensive four colour ads in magazines have the purpose of not persuading but of reminding people to purchase this brand of drink. This is a form of reinforcement advertising. (Kotler, 1994). In all these types of advertising the message execution becomes crucial. It is not only the message that matters. How the message is given becomes very important for emotional and rational positioning of the target buyers. In general a specific beneficial feature of the product that attracts the client is given more preference than to its general features. Japanese ads are generally more indirect and these stimulate the emotional mind. In some of the advertisements for private tuition classes, we observe this type of indirect advertising.

Specific message

In any advertisement, there is a combination of an image and a message which become cohesive, and several styles are seen lifestyle, fantasy, moods, images, slice of life and different types of evidence etc. For instance, in advertisements centred on mobile telephones, images of young people in a stage of communication can be seen. There is very large bill boards where young women in an office setting are enjoying a certain brand of tea. A growing kid is shown in a TV advertisement where a milk powder is advertised. This child has become more intelligent because the mother is feeding it with this brand of milk!

The use of rhetorics, mostly metaphor, simile, pun and exaggeration is quite often observed in our advertisements. Some are designed to inspire humour apart from imparting the specific message about the product. A hilarious life situation is present in the advertisements related to domestic pipes, tiles and wall paints. The practices of offering incentives for the clients who purchase some milk foods, sweets and drinks are not uncommon. This practice is also seen in advertisements published by banks and 'tuition lords'.

What makes one to purchase or buy a brand product? The answer is found in neuroscience/nueroadvertising. Although the science of neuroads has been once discarded as a fad, recent research has shown that it is crucial as it works at the subconscious level and emotions of the prospective buyer or the target audience. The application of brain scanners (brain imaging technology) to neuromarketing concept has provided remarkable information about how the mind works at the market place when one buys any product.

Emotional bonds

Previously and even at present, marketing research has been based on information collected by way of interviews, responses to questionaires and opinion studies of clients over brand products. But there are doubts and defects in these methods. One big weakness is that the vocal responses of the clients may not reflect what is in their minds. They could say something. But they may be thinking of something else at the time of responding to a questionairre. Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist observes that much of the decision-making process of human beings happen at a subconscious level and sometimes the people simply do not know why they choose things (New Scientist, August, 2010). What neuromarketing does is to extract this hidden information from the buyer's brain, and it has been found that emotion are critically important. In essence, brand loyality is built on strong emotional attachment of the buyer's mind to a particular product. Long-term emotional bonds are made to particular brand products and people always prefer them than other substitutes or generics. These emotional bonds are created and maintained by the messages that constantly associate the brand. The emotional links are positive links with the brand. This is the very reason that we continue to stick to brands and defend them.

Indeed there are other benefits which could be related to effectiveness, economics, cultural acceptability and availability and the absence of a potent competitive brand etc. Sometimes it happens that the adverse effects of a brand product have been scientifically tested and proved with the result the product has been banned. Then the brand adherents have to switch over to another. At this instant a new emotional link has to be created by another product.

There is strong evidence to support the science of neuromarketing. In 2004, loyal drinkers in Texas were subject to a challenge from another soft drink inside an FMRI machine. When the subjects did not know which drink they were drinking, the other soft drink triggered the most activity in the cortical areas responsible for rational thought and they declared that they preferred it. But when they were told beforehand that they are given this drink, it provoked stronger activity in the emotion related limbic system of their brains, and their stated preferences switched (Neuron, vol 44, p 379).

The conclusion is that by triggering positive emotions, successful brands override relational choices. There are reward centres in the brain, and it has been found that pictures of sports cars produce much stronger activity in these reward centres than pictures of other cars (Neuroreport vol 13, p2499). EEG tracing of brain activity has been used in neuromarketing research studies. But the EEG is a poor localiser of brain activity, although it gives important information about paying attention, eliciting emotion and memory. Using EEG imaging of 45 women aged between 25 and 35 it was found that a brief gesture of a female model touching her cheek with the back of her hand produce a powerful uplift of emotions among the study subjects, than when they were shown the same and with the female model just looking passively. (Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics, vol2, p21).

Relational choices

It has been reported that with EEG it is possible to predict which advertisement can be remembered after a period of time (Brain Topography vol 23, p 165). Only small samples of clients can be successfully used to measure human buying preferences, because human brains react in a remarkably uniform way to the same stimulus (Knight, 2010).

Neuromarketers claim that they can use the electroencephalograph (EEG) to discover the clients’ hidden needs, likes and desires for consumer products and services. For instance three cover pictures of the magazine ‘New Scientist’, were shown to 19 male subjects who generally purchase it for reading. Each cover was just shown to them for a period of 36 seconds.

After showing each cover a message like ‘eye catching’, ‘intriguing’ and ‘Must buy' were shown to them. During this test they were kept connected to the EEG and the analysis of the results showed which cover was emotionally preferred by the subjects. A powerful EEG signal called p 300, a spike of brain activity, occurs about 300 milliseconds after a person sees something new or personally meaningful. This happens when the test materials (in this case the particular advertisement or the image) has primed the brain to certain concepts like 'must buy' (Lawton, 2010).

Advertisements impinge on human memory. Human memory has a physiological basis and an anatomical basis. But it remains a great scientific challenge to understand memory.

Some parts of the human brain like the cortex/prefrontal cortex mark brief memory of stimuli; Amygdala which is important in memory retrieval and emotional analysis; the hippocampus which processes newly formed information and transfers it to other parts of the cortex; the mammillary body, that relays information to the pre frontal cortex and basal fore brain; and the thalamus that is also involved in information transfer and involved in visual memory retention play a complex role in memory.

The biochemical basis of memory involves a cascade of chemical events and interactions between pre-synaptic and post-synaptic terminals of the brain cells or the neurones (Applin 1997).