Can a B2B CEO benefit from Neuromarketing?

We’ve looked at a lot of different ways that solutions marketing differs from product marketing. A lot has been written about thought leadership, more outcome-oriented value propositions, simulation centers, and other solutions-appropriate marketing approaches. But what about #neuromarketing? 

#Neuromarketing is one of the new frontiers of marketing today. Using it to understand how customers react to consumer product marketing initiatives has proven to be pretty compelling.  The literature describes it as the science of understanding human behavior using pshycometric, biometric and neurometric tools. Since that definition likely didn’t help you very much, here’s another way to describe it. According to Wikipedia, it is: “A new field of marketing which uses medical technologies to study the brain’s responses to marketing stimuli. 

The Bottom Line

This suggests that understanding and predicting consumer behavior must include the perspective of neuroscience. In fact, the combination of “neuro” and "marketing" implies the merging of two fields of study: neuroscience and marketing. Neuroscience and behavioral sciences like Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) believe that the unconscious mind drives how a consumer responds to any visual or aural marketing stimuli -- ads, website content, PPT presentations, etc. 

It Seems to Work for Supermarket Products…But What About B2B Solutions?

While a B2B model doesn’t allow for impulse buying, B2B buyers still have impulsive reactions to solutions marketing messages.

👉The Next Battlefield in Gaining your Customer’s Mindshare

Over the past 5-10 years, we’ve seen a marked improvement in how solutions marketers have developed and implemented solutions-focused marketing messages and campaigns. #Inbound is now dominant over outbound.  

Deep questions also bring deep bridges. 

I´ve always felt attracted by global minds and people able to bridge the gap between brain, sport, emotions, and economics.  Do we really use the brain for taking business decisions or, in the end,  we just follow charisma and desire?.  

👉Neuromarketing is already estimated to be a two billion dollar industry. The problem is that most CEOs and marketing managers know very little about neuroscience. 

There is very little data out there that business managers can actually rely on, and,  on the other hand, marketing managers do not necessarily have the background in neuroscience that is required to assess the options. Even physically, the neuroscience department is typically located near the medical Faculty, whereas marketing uses to be in a totally different building, and not even students are encouraged to speak to each other and mix sciences.  

From a neuroscience perspective, the hope is to learn about the mechanisms that control the way our choices translate into action.

 Neuromarketing researches try to answer such a deep question as:

👉Can I know something about my Client choices before he/she even knows, before anyone else knows?, And if so, how can I affect them?. 

Let´s see an example.  Say you have hired a celebrity like Rafa Nadal to endorse a product, a #Girbau hotel laundry machine, for instance. Two absolutely different images in our minds. And the CEO wants to know how many times a potential key client has to see Rafa Nadal washing his clothes in a Girbau washine-machine before the brain will learn to associate this brand with Rafa Nadal and vice versa. Data from these kind of studies on clients could tell Girbau marketers that, for instance, it takes no more than twenty exposures and no less than five to create some kind of pairing like this. #Girbau marketers might use this information to optimize marketing campaigns.

So clearly neuroscience has the potential to offer firms some rather tantalizing tools. But even less invasive techniques like EEG and fMRI are very expensive. But can these techniques actually tell us anything that relatively inexpensive tools, such as focus groups, do not?.

👉Research on how people engage with content may offer a particularly promising opportunity.

The Rules of #Engagement

Engagement has always been something of a holy grail for marketers. Previous studies suggest that we find engaging content more satisfying than less engaging content—and we are likelier to want to experience that content again. For a while, researchers were busy looking for specific patterns of brain activity that could then be linked with engagement. When we watch a hilarious YouTube video, or listen to an enticing lecturer, do parts of the brain reliably become active that do not when we watch something dull—like Andy Warhol’s “Empire,” which features over eight hours of slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building? Neuroscientists have been trying to identify such a site for a while, but no consistent results have emerged. For a while neuroscientists were at a standstill on this front.

But in 2008, neuroscientists proposed that engagement could be detected by looking at similarities across brains—that engagement has a uniforming effect on neural activity. “It makes all brains look the same. So it means that here, maybe it is going to be silent in your brain. But its also going to be silent in my brain,”. “Twenty people are going to sit there and they are all going to have that part silent … Boring content lets all brains wander in different directions. Engaging content takes over everyone’s brain in a similar way.”