Neuromarketing for Branding

15 January 21

When customers make a purchase of a product or service, their mind consciously pays attention to the item, but do not really know the reason why they spend money on it. According to Jennifer Williams, the marketing director of American Macular Degeneration Foundation, when customers are making their decisions for buying, it is not necessarily a logical decision, but a decision deep in their brains based on thoughts and emotions.  In this situation, neuromarketing has the answer. It helps us to understand the unknown subconscious level of customers’ mind which affects their decisions in making a purchase.

Neuromarketing was developed by Gerry Zaltman, a marketing professor at Harvard University, in the 1990s. It is a scientific study of how human’s brain responds to advertising and branding. Neuromarketing and branding complement each other. Based on a study conducted by Radiological Society of North America, when a human's brain is exposed to a known brand, the image will be processed with positive emotions, while an unknown brand takes more effort for the brain to read them and will be associated with negative emotions.

Neuromarketing helps a brand to have a better understanding and predict the behaviour of customers in order to create the best customer experiences. According to neuromarketing, consumers’ preferences and behaviours for a brand depends on habits, feelings, perceptions, and their personal experiences. To conduct a neuromarketing, it uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). With the help of fMRI when exposed to a brand logo, the customers’ brain will evaluate whether the said brand is significant or not for them.

An example of a brand which uses the principles of neuromarketing is H&M. The clothing brand worked together with influencers to showcase their outfits on Instagram. Humans tend to trust an expert of the industry. Consumers are most likely to get influence from someone who has known about the product. In this case, neuromarketing explains the familiarity a consumer gets when they see an influencer promoting a brand. It is called the Mere Exposure Effect. The more a customer is exposed to a brand, the more they like it. To make your brand have its characters for consumers to always remember, Milestone, as one of the leading branding agencies in Indonesia, would assist you, from conducting the research of your target customers to develop the suitable colour for your brand.