We here at Young Marketers make it our mission every day to push forward the next generation of geniuses in the $138 billion world of marketing. Marketing is widely perceived as just posting a pretty picture and using some decent words, but as cliche as it sounds, it is so much more than that. Neuromarketing is all around you every single day, which you rarely every notice. In this blog we will be telling you about what neuromarketing is, how it targets unconscious behavior, and how it aims for your emotions.
Neuromarketing is defined on The Future of Commerce as “the scientific study of how the brain responds to branding and advertising.” (What is Neuromarketing? How your brain responds to branding). Neuromarketing is simply marketing that aims to attack your brain, which happens to us legitimately every day whether or not you realize it. In the late 90’s, Professor Gerald Zaltman did one of the first experiments associated with neuromarketing, and his patented his methods under the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, or ZMET for short, which was picked up by companies like Coca-Cola, Nestle, and General Motors, and this paved the way for the future of advertising. Neuromarketing is simply used to make you subconsciously want to buy purchase a product or service, nothing more nothing less.
Neuromarketing is essentially targeting our unconscious behavior, by making us more interested in a product in ways we may not even realize. A way unconscious behavior has been studied so to speak was by Google. In an example brought up by Terry Wu in his Ted Talk was by changing the color of the links to sites that come up when you google something. Knowing that slight variations in color can affect us, Google tested around 50 different shades of blue for the links, and found out which one affected users more, increasing yearly revenue by $200 million. This just goes to show one way that our unconscious mind draws us into interacting with something, even with us hardly noticing a difference.
One of the more obvious ways we are neurologically targeted is via our emotions. Everybody has seen those ASPCA commercials with the Sarah Mclachlan song playing so you will donate to the animals who look incredibly sad in the commercial. This is a more overt way of targeting you, but extremely effective since the ASPCA brings in $267,684,553 in total revenue. All of us have been affected by this and are every day, especially people with pets. I adopted my dog Luna from 11th Hour Rescue, she is a rescue dog who was literally found in a bush on the beaches of Puerto Rico after a hurricane. The picture on display of her was maybe the saddest thing I have ever seen, and fast forward almost two and a half years later we have an immensely happy 2 and a half year old dog. This just goes to show how even obvious examples of neuromarketing are used every single day.
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