Shopper Brain Conference welcomed all marketing specialists, behavior scientists, retailers, and providers, reuniting amazing professionals in consumer behavior, neuroeconomics and psychological research, who have come from different corners of the world to explore the newest researches and topics related to Shopper Science.
The first day was opened by Leo van de Polder and Carla Nagel, the organizers of the event.
This year Buyer Brain spoke about “Neuroscience of Effort – Why Customers Love it Easy?”, approaching Customer Effort from two perspectives: a customer conscious mindset and their non-conscious attitudes and emotions. The main focus of the presentation was, first of all on understanding the role that emotions and habits play in shaping consumer behavior, exploring the implicit drivers of customer engagement and assessing the impact of effort on the overall consumer experience.
The importance of this subject can be seen in our everyday lives. In an age where technology brings everything to our fingertips, we resent making an extra effort to get what we want. We expect companies to make it easy for us to work with them and we penalize those that fail to do so. We demand the same seamless experience across channels, at any moment during the day or night. And the younger the generation, the more prevalent this attitude.
With ever increasing competitive offers from the competition and the simplicity and ease to find alternative solutions online, customers become more empowered and have ever more negotiation leverage. This leads to an interesting attitude shift, where customers have less patience with companies that do not fulfill their needs according to their expectations. And they are less forgiving with companies that require extra effort from them to make things work.
Exploring these topics from a neuroscience point of view, Ana Iorga, Founder and Chief Neuroscientist at Buyer Brain, looked at emotions, the role they play and the implications of effort in shaping customer expectations and long-term engagement.
Among the amazing speakers present at this event, the first day, Eamon Fulcher, Director at Split Second Research talked about the effectiveness of strike through and other techniques in different markets. He draw special attention to scientific background of split-second decision making affected by different price strategies, implicit measures of price decision making in different segments, finalizing with tips and tricks for shopper marketers and retailers.
He also spoke the famous 2 systems: System 1 – Old Brain (beliefs, values, imagination, habits, emotions, intuition) and System 2 – New Brain (logical thinking, critical evaluation and will power), stressing out that implicit reaction time testing is indeed the ideal measure for marketing right now. This is used to test packaging, product claims, for advertising evaluation, tracking brand equity, attributes and figuring out brand positioning and brand values. The advantages of it being that: researchers can integrate explicit and implicit responses, the answers are very difficult to fake, it has a fast implementation process and easy to administer online, returning results in just ta few days. The best thing about it is that it enables us to understand better consumer behavior.
Graeme Newell had a really captivating presentation that was both insightful and entertaining for the attendees. He is President at 602 Communications and talked about the best practices for building emotional attachment with a focus on understanding the core emotional motivators that drive emotional engagement. Speaking from his generous professional experience with testing advertising campaigns, he highlighted that every piece of marketing needs something from System 1 in their ad; it cannot be based on purely rational aspects. The Ad needs to be clearly tied to the companies’ product and how the experience of it would be like for the consumer.
Last, but not least, Peter Steidl delighted us with interesting facts and examples, best picks all collected from his recent books on neuromarketing and shopper marketing. For those of you who have not heard of him, he is the Principal at Neurothinking & Author at Shopper Marketing and Neuromarketing Essentials. His presentation started with a clear-cut warming for the audience: we’ve come to a point when we either keep up/change or die. Then he went on to talk about the impact that technological disruption has on the retail sector and shopper marketing, but also about how marketing, retail and shopper marketing need to change in order to succeed, passing from the focus on execution to new strategies with positive results for shopper marketing.
It was a day full of interesting case studies, brilliant conversations and knowledge sharing! The second day of Shopper Brain Conference is coming, so stay close to find out all about it! Find out more information about the event, with a single click here.
The Shopper Brain Conference 2017 is organized by the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association (NMSBA) – the global trade association for those involved in the field of neuromarketing in close cooperation with Shop!
Note: You can read the Romanian version here.
