We had 2 days to enjoy the newest and most intriguing topics from the Neuromarketing field delivered to us by some of the best speakers of the moment.
We are happy to share with you a few snapshots from some of the presentations that we’ve attended on the second day.
Matthew Willcox, the Founding Partner of The Business of Choice, presented “Marketing to Consumers’ Instincts” and he spoke about the three roles of marketing, how people choose and the consequences of those choices.
So, what can marketing do? First, it can create long lasting emotional associations and long-lasting memories of a brand. Second, it can act as a trigger to recall those memories and third, it can activate cognitive shortcuts.
But how does human nature influence the choices that we make? The human species is the product of a long string of choices that were right more often than they were wrong. For example, fearing snakes was probably a very good survival strategy. Some of these mechanisms are still similar today, like our snake phobias, and they keep us making the right choices. In conclusion, we use cognitive shortcuts to make choices, these intuitive shortcuts being the bedrock of our decisions.
Approaching the shopper psychology in a changing world, Liraz Margalit, Web Psychologist and Head of Behavioral Research at Clicktale, talked about the psychology behind shoppers’ online decisions. She spoke about how people make online decisions, what types of factors influence the decision-making processes and how to capture intent, analyze behavior and change user flows.
What do you think – are we in control of our online decisions? Actually, the problem of decision making is even more difficult online than offline, because online, a decision equals to every click, CTA (call to action), closing a website, buying online and so on. To cope with the very high number of decisions that we have to make daily, we have developed coping mechanisms for making decisions fast while using as little information as possible, for a quick judgement.
Since the old approaches of analyzing consumers’ behavior were not as successful in the new environments, there was a big need to create a model that accurately described decision making in the online world. It refers to key-concepts such as: mindset, personality and context (all influencing choice). We need to consider the visitor’s different mindset, the context in which the decision was previously made (industry, page, website) and the personality traits, some showing only online, some offline, others overlapping.
The Marketing arena is still the playground for specialists looking to bring forth theories and practices from the areas of consumer psychology and neuroscience.
As such, Dalibor Sumiga, Behavioral Marketing Specialist, Founder & CEO of Promosapiens talked about The Power of Priming.
For all of you that are not familiar with the effect of priming, it is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus.
But why is it so important to use priming?
Because something interesting happens with our association networks: our brains do what we call a “synaptic pruning” which is basically a process through which we get rid of weaker associations that are not relevant to us. For example, if one likes the Apple brand, he will have weaker associations between this brand and attributes such as pretentious, expensive, complicated etc. of which he/she will get rid eventually.
In a nutshell, Sumiga draws our attention to the fact that the brand experience is what matters the most, even before consumers buy it.
Also, during his presentation he showed how priming influencing brand awareness is actually a multi-dimensional (3-stage) process instead of a one-dimensional process: Brand awareness phase (Have you heard of them?), Brand recognition phase (Heard of them and know what they do) and Brand consideration phase (Considering using their service or buying their product).
Using business-case examples, he applied this knowledge and showed us how to build brand awareness using the priming mechanism, leaving us with an important message: what feeds your brain controls your life!
By the time the conference ended, we were happy to have been a part of an amazing community, that shares our passion for business applied neuro-principles. So, we want to thank the organizers for this amazing experience and we hope that you enjoyed the subjects as much as we did. Stay with us for new adventures in the Consumer neuroscience world!
