What Is Neuromarketing? A Simple Guide for Business Owners
What the method can answer for a small or mid-sized business, what it costs in effort, which cheaper behavioural methods come first and how to judge a pitch.
Answer to the question
What is neuromarketing?
What is neuromarketing? It is the recording of brain or body responses to marketing material, such as advertisements, packaging or web pages. For a business owner its best-supported use is comparing versions of costly, widely shown advertising, while questions about pages, prices and offers are usually answered more cheaply by controlled online tests and direct observation.
Key takeaways
- Venkatraman and colleagues (2015) set six kinds of measurement, among them self-reports, eye tracking, EEG and brain imaging, against market response to thirty-second television advertisements, and found the neuroimaging measures added explanatory power beyond the traditional ones.
- That finding concerns advertisements and market-level response, not what one customer wants, so the clearest fit for the method is costly, widely shown advertising.
- Cost in effort follows four drivers: how many people are recorded, how many measures are taken, how many versions are tested and how much analysis follows.
- Nisbett and Wilson (1977) reviewed evidence that people tend to report plausible causal theories about their responses, which is one reason controlled online tests and observation are a cheaper first step.
- Philip Graves offers five questions about behaviour, frame of mind, setting, concealment and timing, and a pitch can be judged further by asking for the decision, the comparison and the audience.
A study in the Journal of Marketing Research set six kinds of measurement against the market response to thirty-second television advertisements, among them self-reports, eye tracking, [EEG](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/eeg-neuromarketing) and brain imaging. Venkatraman and colleagues reported in 2015 that the neuroimaging measures added explanatory power beyond the traditional ones, and that activity in a brain region called the ventral striatum was the strongest single predictor of market-level response to advertising. For an owner asking what is neuromarketing and whether it is worth buying, the study draws a clear boundary: the test material was advertising, the outcome was response across a market, and the question was what the new measures add to the ones already in use.
What is neuromarketing good for?
Neuromarketing, the method set out in the definition and its history, records how the brain or body responds to marketing material such as an advertisement, a package or a web page, usually while a person looks at it. The family includes brain imaging, EEG, eye tracking, skin and heart responses and facial coding, and each answers a different question. Eye tracking records where the gaze goes. EEG records the timing of electrical activity at the scalp. Imaging records which brain regions respond.
The questions it suits share three features: the audience is large, the material is costly to produce, and the choice is between versions of the same thing. A business comparing two cuts of a film advertisement before a major campaign is one illustration. In that setting, what can neuromarketing add? It can show how an audience responded to each version while the version played, which a questionnaire completed afterwards cannot.
That study shows why this class of question is the sensible one. Its measures were set against what happened in the market, which is the comparison a buyer of any measurement service should ask for. The finding concerns advertisements and audiences. It does not say that a scan can name what one customer wants, and the claim that purchases are settled by an older part of the brain has its own evidence and its own limits.
What a study demands in effort
What is neuromarketing likely to cost an owner? Mostly effort, and the effort has a recognisable shape. Recording brain or body responses usually needs participants who come to a controlled setting, equipment that records them and analysts who can turn the recordings into something a marketing team can act on. It also needs a comparison, either two versions of the material or one version against a baseline, because a single recording of one advertisement cannot say whether the response is high or low.
Running six measurement types over a set of advertisements, as the Venkatraman team did, gives a sense of the programme behind a result of that kind. Price follows four drivers: how many people are recorded, how many measures are taken, how many versions are tested and how much analysis follows. A quotation for any study should break those four items out.
For a small or mid-sized business the larger issue is scale. The evidence for the method rests on audiences and on advertisements shown to many people, so a business running a campaign for a modest audience has less to gain from measuring responses this way than one placing a single large bet. For a modest audience, what could neuromarketing settle that a controlled online test cannot? That is an interpretation of the evidence, not a finding of any study, and it points an owner towards methods that work at the size of the business.
Cheaper ways to answer the same question
Philip Graves argues in Consumer.ology that the strongest evidence about customers comes from what they do in the real setting, ideally without knowing what is being studied, and not from what they say about themselves. The argument rests on an older finding. Nisbett and Wilson reviewed evidence in 1977 that people have little or no direct access to the higher-order processes behind their responses and tend to report plausible causal theories instead, which are accurate mainly when the stimulus is salient and a common-sense cause of the response. A survey of reasons, sometimes called the self-report problem, works for obvious causes and is a weaker instrument for subtle ones.
Behavioural evidence is also cheaper to collect. A controlled online test shows two versions to comparable groups of visitors and counts what each group does. Kohavi and colleagues describe the theory as simple and as dating to agricultural trials of the 1920s, and they report that running such experiments at scale throws up surprising outcomes whose investigation repays the time. Watching customers in the shop or on the page needs attention more than equipment: how many pick a product up and put it back, or where a visitor stops scrolling, are counts an owner can make.
Indirect attitude measures sit between asking and watching. Bar-Anan and Nosek compared seven of them in 2014, found the best-known test and its brief version performed best overall, and reported that agreement with direct questions varied from topic to topic. Used that way they supplement behavioural data and leave it in charge.
| Owner's question | Cheaper method | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Which version of a page, price or offer sells more? | Controlled online test | Why customers preferred the winner |
| Where do customers hesitate? | Direct observation in the shop or on the page | Whether hesitation signals interest or confusion |
| What does the brand bring to mind? | Indirect association measure alongside direct questions | Whether the association changes what people buy |
| Why do customers say they chose the business? | Interviews and short surveys | The causes customers cannot report |
Questions to put to any pitch
A pitch for neuromarketing work can be judged with questions that need no technical training. Graves offers five for any research design, which he calls the AFECT criteria: whether the evidence concerns what people did or what they said; whether participants were in the frame of mind of a real purchase; whether the setting resembled the real one, with price, packaging and alternatives present; whether the purpose of the study was hidden from them; and whether the time allowed matched the time a real decision takes.
The same design models the further questions a neuromarketing pitch should answer, since it asked what each measure added beyond the others. A recording of one person watching one advertisement alone can meet some of the five tests and miss others, and a good pitch says which.
- Which decision will the result inform, and who will make it?
- Compared with what: a second version, a baseline or the market outcome?
- Which audience was recorded, how many people, and do they resemble the business's customers?
- What does the measure add beyond a survey or an online test the business could run now?
- Is the claim about an audience or about one individual customer?
The sensible order is the cheap test first: if a controlled experiment or a period of observation settles the question, nothing is left for a brain measure to decide, and if it does not, the unanswered part becomes the brief for a specialist study.
Common questions
What is neuromarketing?
It is the recording of brain or body responses to marketing material, such as advertisements, packaging or web pages, to inform a decision about that material. A 2015 study in the Journal of Marketing Research tested it on television advertisements.
What is neuromarketing used for in a small business?
Its best-supported use is comparing versions of costly, widely shown advertising. For questions about pages, prices and offers, controlled online tests and direct observation are usually the cheaper first step.
What is neuromarketing's main limit for owners?
The evidence concerns audiences responding to advertisements, not what one customer wants. Nisbett and Wilson's 1977 review also explains why asking customers alone has limits, which is why behavioural evidence is the usual companion.
How do I judge a neuromarketing pitch?
A buyer weighing what neuromarketing would actually deliver should ask which decision the result informs, what it was compared with, which audience was recorded and what it adds beyond a survey or an online test. Graves adds five questions about behaviour, frame of mind, setting, concealment of purpose and timing.
Sources
Graves, P. Consumer.ology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping.
Venkatraman, V., Dimoka, A., Pavlou, P. A., Vo, K., Hampton, W., Bollinger, B., Hershfield, H. E., Ishihara, M., & Winer, R. S. (2015). 'Predicting advertising success beyond traditional measures: New insights from neurophysiological methods and market response modeling.' Journal of Marketing Research, 52(4), 436-452. doi:10.1509/jmr.13.0593 https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0593
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). 'Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.' Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231
Kohavi, R., Deng, A., Frasca, B., Longbotham, R., Walker, T., & Xu, Y. (2012). 'Trustworthy online controlled experiments: five puzzling outcomes explained.' Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '12). doi:10.1145/2339530.2339653 https://doi.org/10.1145/2339530.2339653
Bar-Anan, Y., & Nosek, B. A. (2014). 'A comparative investigation of seven indirect attitude measures.' Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 668-688. doi:10.3758/s13428-013-0410-6 https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0410-6