Harnessing The Power of Digital Neuromarketing
If you want to gain unprecedented insight into how your creatives, brand messaging and marketing really make your consumers feel – and get the keys to help you truly maximise your results for your next product launch or marketing campaign – then leveraging neurmarketing technology as part of your market research could be the missing piece to unlocking your influence with your customers.
But how can digital neuromarketing transform and supercharge your next product launch, concept test or marketing campaign? Why are these new online market research tools essential for modern day marketers? And are these new digital consumer research methods really powerful enough to collect and analyse people’s real unconscious reactions, emotions, and unlock their unconscious decision drivers?
In this article, we’ll deep dive into the future of digital neuromarketing and market research, and discover how this pioneering new technology can help optimise your next product launch, concept test, or marketing campaign.
But first, we’ll take a look at what really drives our decisions, what makes us decide to (or not to buy) a certain product, brand, or engage with a campaign or call to action.
The Unconscious Drivers of our Lives
As humans, we are emotionally driven beings. Despite decades of modernism pushing rationalism as the pinnacle of human evolution through the early and mid-20th century – where transcending emotions through rational thinking and force of intellect was seen as the highest form of self-progression, the advent of postmodernism and recent advances in neuropsychology have shifted our understanding beyond this reductive view.
Postmodernism, and the insights from neuropsychology that followed, redefined the human experience as one where emotions are the primary and central driver of our lives, with these (often unconscious) triggers in fact directing our behaviour and actions far more than was ever appreciated in the preceding era of modernist driven rationalism.
Marketers have long known the importance of the unconscious and emotions in our decision making – including their primary influence on our decisions regarding what we purchase, the brands we choose to engage with, and those we become loyal to. Buying – as is commonly accepted these days – is less a rational act, and more an emotional response, an act which signifies our underlying desire to achieve a certain feeling or state.
Not only is the decision to purchase itself an emotional one, driven by unconscious processes and reactions to further unconscious, emotional reactions to external stimuli we are presented with, but the act of buying itself is less about the product purchased, and much more about the perceived emotion, feeling, or state that product will help us feel and experience. We aren’t buying things – but feelings. We buy with emotion, in order to experience other – we hope positive – emotions.
This is why marketers take such pains to focus marketing efforts not so much on the product itself, but on the positive associations associated with the product – the feelings we will feel when we buy and own it. We don’t buy a car – we buy perceived status, or so the advert’s unconscious anchors tell us.
Most often, rather than rationalising and weighing up the pros and cons, and then consciously deciding to buy, in fact the opposite is often true. We buy based on unconscious emotional reactions, and then carefully backwards rationalise why we decided to make that purchase.
Neuromarketing: The Key to Unlocking the Power of your Creatives?
With consumers’ decision-making processes being mostly driven by unconscious emotional factors and triggers, it follows that understanding and unlocking the unconscious associations, emotions, and anchors that your creatives, brand messaging and marketing materials are conveying, inducing, and communicating to people are the keys to maximising the effectiveness of your latest product launches, marketing campaigns, and brand messaging.
You want to have insight into the emotions that are being triggered, and into the unconscious and implicit reactions people have to your materials, to ensure that you are maximising the investment for the desired result or outcome of that launch or campaign. This is where Neuromarketing can help – and can be the difference between a campaign that pops, or flops…
Neuromarketing is the study of how our brains respond to advertising and other brand-related messages by monitoring brainwave activity, and a number of other neurological and physiological parameters.
Marketers use neural and other physiological signals to gain insight into customers’ preferences, reactions, and decision-making processes. They also use it to research and gain insight into how a particular product, concept, or marketing campaign will likely perform.
Digital Neuromarketing at Bolt: A powerful New Approach
While traditional neuromarketing methods and practices can be insightful and powerful, they are often expensive, cumbersome and resource intensive – requiring either lab-based experiments with volunteers being connected to physical EEG devices and other monitoring setups, or renting out store space in order to conduct in-store shelf tests – all of which require considerable investment in time, money, and operational heavy lifting.
At Bolt – we do things differently. We provide our clients access to the power of neuromarketing technologies to unlock the insights to maximise their next launch, ad, or campaign as part of their market and consumer research efforts – but in a way that’s exponentially more agile, scalable, and affordable than traditional methods.
Our revolutionary, digital online approach provides you with unprecedented access to customers’ anywhere in the world directly through their own personal laptop’s web camera, including in traditionally hard to reach markets and territories, and at scales not previously possible given the needs for laboratories and hardware, and at a fraction of the cost.
Through a combination of eye tracking, facial coding and recognition, and implicit reaction measurement, Creative Neuro allows you unprecedented insight into the unconscious reactions of your consumers – and crack the code of precisely what resonates and what doesn’t in your creatives and campaigns. It can provide insight into exactly what aspects create which precise implicit reactions and emotions, and help understand how to truly optimise your creatives or ideas to achieve your desired outcome.
So How does it Work?
Through employing cutting edge digital consumer research technologies, directly through the webcam on customers’ laptops – we generate data driven insight dashboards to decode the emotions and unconscious, implicit reactions to your visual stimuli.
The insights give an in-depth understanding of the real emotional impact of your creatives, concepts, brand messaging and campaigns, and lift the veil on the unconscious reactions they are having on your consumers, and how they may precisely be unconsciously either positively or negatively impacting their decisions.
We do this through utilising three specific pillars:
1. Eye Tracking
Eye tracking is the field of monitoring what people do with their eyes, observing what people choose to look at, how their eyes move, and how their visual activities behave.
The technology converts eye movements into a data stream that contains information such as pupil position, the gaze vector for each eye, and gaze point.
Compared to hardware eye tracking devices (which requires inviting participants to a lab), we can track participants’ eyes anywhere in the world through their own computer / web camera.
2. Facial Coding
Facial coding is the process of measuring human emotions through facial expressions. Emotions can be detected by FACS trained coders or by computer algorithms to generate automatic emotion recognition through recording facial expressions via webcam.
This can be used to help enhance understanding of people’s reactions to visual stimuli.
With facial coding, the 7 primary emotions detected are anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. These emotions are understood to be cross-culturally and universally communicated through particular facial expressions.
3. Implicit Reaction Time
Implicit reaction time tests (IRTs) are one of the fastest growing approaches in market research. Online, objective, and cost-effective, they capture consumers’ immediate, gut instinct or subconscious responses to brands, campaigns, new product concepts, packaging designs, and a vast array of other marketing related outputs.
Free from the biases of conscious rationalisation and distracting ploys inherent in quantitative and qualitative research, IRTs offer marketers a chance to study consumers at a deep, emotional level and predict their behaviour more accurately than has previously been possible.
How it works for the Participants
Participants are initially asked to give permission to the use of their webcam. They are also asked to adjust their position to ensure our system receives the highest data quality possible.
After the validation, the participant starts the process by watching the adverts shown to them on the screen.
This may be combined with a questionnaire in which they can answer questions based on what they see on the screen.
Discover Digital Neuromarketing with Bolt!
How Exactly Can Digital Neuromarketing Help Me?
Whether you are launching a new product, pack design, concept or product concept, an ad or marketing campaign, our digital neuromarketing solutions and services can help you leverage the power of neuromarketing to help optimize your offering and campaign though understanding the implicit emotional and unconscious responses they are generating in your customers.
Digital neuromarketing can help with a wide range of uses cases and across multiple applications – including:
1. New Product / Pack / Concept Designs
- Gain insight into the emotional reactions your designs create in your customers
- Optimise logo / claim placement and messaging
2. Shelf Tests / Designs
- Optimise product placement on the shelf
- Track customer eye movements and implicit reactions to understand if the new product is noticed quickly on the shelf among competitors
3. Advertisements / Campaigns
- Identify and track which parts of the ad are working well (high positive engagement) and which parts are not working well (less positive engagement), scene by scene
- Help to shorten or edit the advertisement where needed based on precision emotional feedback
- Optimise logo / claim placement and messaging – eye tracking can help understand if people are paying attention to the brand and other important messages of the ad such product demo, or any other aspect that refers to brand messaging and placement
We’re Here to Help You Harness the Power of Digital Neuromarketing!
We know that online consumer research and market research insights are now essential for marketers and researchers to collect high-quality data in a more convenient and cost-effective way. With our comprehensive digital neuromarketing solution, we can now help our partners to get direct, rich, consumer-validated data directly from real people, all across the world.
Whether you need to conduct market research for your next campaign, brand messaging, concept testing, or or product launch, we can help your leverage it’s power to help optimise your content, refine your messaging, and understand the real emotional and unconscious impact that your materials are having on your customers with the insights that will help transform your appproach – at scales and costs never before possible.
Discover Digital Neuromarketing with Bolt!
