martes, 7 de mayo de 2013

Marketers exploiting secrets of the living brain


Marketers exploiting secrets of the living brain
The same primitive impulses that helped early man survive against the evolutionary odds are drawing shopper Denam Drew to a pair of tan suede shoes. At least that's the theory behind neuromarketing, an emerging field that uses the tools of neuroscience to understand the secrets of the consumer brain.
Drew is holding the shoe in his hand while researcher Adam Spadaro stands behind him watching his brain waves light up a computer screen in colourful flares of red, yellow and green. All of this is possible because Drew is wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap with electrodes placed all over his head, recording the electrical impulses on the surface of his brain. He's also wearing eye tracking goggles to reveal exactly what he's looking at when the computer records a flash of emotion.

A region-by-region exploration of how the brain functions

"The goggles use the pupils as a reference point to track where your eyes are looking and wherever the eyes go, that's a measure of the attention of the brain and that's key information for marketers," Spadaro says. He's completing a PhD in cognitive psychology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, but at the same time he's using his scientific knowledge to help get one of Canada's first neuromarketing companies off the ground.
"It would be really useful for a brand to know if this product is or is not capturing a consumer's attention," Spadaro says, struggling to balance his laptop computer in the middle of the shoe store and, at the same time, monitor the flashing images of Drew's brain on the screen.
"It's really giving you a lot of insight into his emotional response, much more so than if you were just to ask him how he’s feeling. Sometimes you can get a truer response to his emotion. That offers a lot of insight that neuroscience has been taking advantage of for several decades now and marketers are now beginning to take advantage of it."
Neuromarketer Diana Lucaci adjusts eye tracking goggles on shopper Denam Drew. Lucaci uses new technologies to measure consumers' engagement, attention and memory. ()
Neuromarketer Diana Lucaci adjusts eye tracking goggles on shopper Denam Drew. Lucaci uses new technologies to measure consumers' engagement, attention and memory. ()(CBC)

Diana Lucaci is also here at this Toronto shopping centre to supervise the research. She is the founder of True Impact Marketing, which she says is the first and only neuromarketing research company in Canada that uses both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to try to read consumers' minds. Her company owns the EEG cap and eye tracking goggles, but when she wants to use an fMRI machine, she has to buy time from hospitals and universities.
"The three key metrics we measure are engagement, attention, and memory," she says. "We're able to measure levels of positive and negative emotion as well. A company would want to know if its brand elicits a particular emotional response, if it's positive or negative at a particular point in time," she says. "That is invaluable information for marketers because it takes a lot of guess-work out. You're not launching a campaign and crossing your fingers hoping you know what your customers feel and what they want."
"My formal education is in neuroscience from the University of Toronto," she says, "following that, I've worked progressively in roles in marketing and communications."
"As a marketer, I always wanted better tools before we went to market with a campaign. When you know that a campaign requires millions of dollars and putting it together takes months and months, and the only data you have is a survey, and often you don’t even have that, so you just cross your fingers and hope that people pay attention."
Traditional market research has always tried to analyze how consumers think and feel about a product or a brand, using focus groups and surveys. The problem is, sometimes consumers don't tell the truth. "In focus groups, what often happens is that you get people skewing their answer to what they think the marketer wants to hear or what will make them sound better in front of the other participants," Lucaci says.
But what if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level? The theory is that consumer motivation starts there, with a series of brain chemical triggers rooted in primal neural circuits that evolved to help humans make decisions that would help or hinder survival. Assuming consumer choice is not purely rational, but rather is strongly biased by emotion, neuromarketers believe that if they can read pleasure or disinterest at this unconscious level, they can better predict what consumers will buy or avoid.
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jueves, 2 de mayo de 2013

Neuromarketing World Forum 2013 Experience





Neuromarketing World Forum 2013 Experience

After attending the 1st Neuromarketing World Forum organized by the Neuromarketing Sience & Business Association and Carla Nagel (Director of NMSBA) last year in Amsterdam, my life was changed by the people I met there and the friendships we built. So this year I met again my neuromarketing family, this time in Brazil! The 2nd edition ofNeuromarketing World Forum took place in São Paulo between 6th and 8th of March, at the Renaissance Hotel – a really nice location near Avenida Paulista.
DSCN6188 225x300 Neuromarketing World Forum 2013 Experience
6th of March – Program of the day
On 6th of March, the Forum started with the neuromarketing masterclass “Brain of the consumer” held by Leon Zurawicki (Professor at UMASS-Boston and author of “Neuromarketing, Exploring the Brain of the Consumer”). Agenda of the day included discussions about how to use neuromarketing research, the technology employed, perspectives of the field concerning segmentation and design, theories of emotions and rational vs. emotional in buying behavior. He defined neuromarketing as being a blend of techniques documenting neuronal reactions in the brain / rest of the body to assure deeper insight relative to traditional research methods, studying brand significance, perception, preference, but also data processing and decision making, as it promises to measure unconscious processing.
Prof. Zurawicki also explained how neuromarketing research is useful in education (how cam we learn better, meditation), in management (in building teams and leaders), but also in political science.  Leon Zurawicki then presented the topography of the brain functions and hemispheric specialization, but also the research tool used in neuromarketing research, each of them having certain accuracy and portability in research and measuring different aspects (electrical activity of the brain; chemical processes in the brain; physiological reactions like blushing, sweat or blood flow; behavior – alertness, speed of reaction and calmness). We also had an overiew of how our senses (vision, hearing, taste and touch) impact how we perceive different stimuli and how advertisers should use this knowledge in their campaigns.
Although marketing talks about the needs to be satisfied, the focus should be on the fulfillment of desires. He talked about Davidson’s approach/withdrawal model in seeking pleasurable rewards vs. avoiding punishments.
Prof. Zurawicki also presented research that linked certain constructs or processes (anger, anxiety, attention, cognitive effort, consciousness, disgust, distrust, envy, fear, frustration, love, hate, jealousy, etc.) with certain brain areas. He emphasized the future perspectives should cover new design options and also segmentation styles based on neuroresearch, as neuroscience adds value to the understanding of what makes us human.
 DSCN6372 Neuromarketing World Forum 2013 Experience  DSCN6194 Neuromarketing World Forum 2013 Experience
7th of March started with a warm welcome from Carla Nagel (Director of the Neuromarketing Sience & Business Association) and a talk of Marcelo Peruzzo (Chief Brain Officer of IPDOIS neurobusiness, Local chair of the NMSBA in Brazil) about the growing interest in neuromarketing. All participants received a special edition of his latest book entitled “The three minds of neuromarketing”, and also a nice 3D printed souvenir with “I ♥ NMSBA”.

Track: Consumer decision making Prof. Gemma Calvert (Founder of Neurosense) talked about how we can better understand the consumer and the challenges that neuromarketing faces: validity, scalabilityand integration with mainstream market research. After presenting what happened in the research area over the last year, she showed an interesting case study of a Neurosense research on cleaning products. Extending a leading brand into a new category sector may be a difficult decision, so their research identified whether they should proceed or not. Volunteers were scanned using fMRI as they viewed images of the current brand, and 2 planned brand extensions. Than they answered a questionnaire about their preferences and an implicit Brainlink™ test. So their research used both conscious explicit and subconscious implicit responses from consumers in order to determine which brand extension appeals to the consumers. Implicit responses are difficult to fake and lead to the detection of unobservable attitudes and feelings with high level of predictive validity, as tests eliminate errors caused by ‘social desirability’ on the need to be consistent. And research proves that implicit assessments are better predictors of consumers’ choices. Another Neurosense research states that MTV is more engaging than other media brands, as they tested the implicit responses for 10 different countries.


At Neurosense, they conduct research on brands (extension, position, comparison, tracking), ads (effectiveness, responses), packaging (responses, attributes), media (attributes, comparison), general tracking and cross-cultural / age / language studies. Gemma Calvert talked about green neuromarketing(together with insights from behavioral economics, neuromarketing is being used to improve public health campaigns) and cross-cultural neuromarketing (scientists are finding cross-cultural differences in brain structures and function which help explain behaviour). We also found out that a new research article published in PLOS One on February 2013 states that brain scans predict voting preference with 82.9% accuracy.
Next, Jaime Romano Micha (Director of Neuromarketing Mexico) presented a 6 step model calledNeuropyramid that explains what happens after stimuli are perceived in the brain - a model of the decision making process. He talked about mental processes involved in human decision making process likeattention (arousal, filtration and orientation), sensorial activation, emotion (which affects heart rate, respiration rate and depth, electroderman response, peripheral blood flow, skin temperature, muscle tone),cognition, action regulator, verbalization and the actual action, and he also presented a stimulus hyerarchy (life threatning, species conservation, personal needs or interest).
Jaime Romano stated that stimuli analysis is intimately related to language, and with the rational and conscious part of our mind, being a process of dividing the whole in smaller parts in order to compare the data, and valued in terms of the good, the bad, the better – in order to make hypothesis and suppositions. On the other hand, synthesis combines and reorganizes the previously analyzed data in the light of our own needs. It joins everything together including the rational, sensorial, perceptual and emotional components in packs of holographic information.
Next speaker had a short presentation about neuromarketing in politics research. After presenting the neuromarketing tools usually employed in sauch research, we found out about a case study of a Brazilian presidential campaign. Research intended to answer questions like ‘what is the emotional engagement between a candidate and the voters?’ and ‘Can the president transfer votes to a candidate?’ and had 18 participants for GSR and EEG testing.
Next track included presentations about how neuromarketing can build a better future for advertising. Néstor Braidot (CEO of Braidot Brain Decision Centre) talked about the chance and challenge of neuroscience and neuromarketing in emerging markets. The presentation started with a talk about how the neural connections that are the base of decision making are formed, and then Néstor Braidot also talked about the right and left hemispheres, mirror neurons, the differences of the female and the male brain, and hormone studies. He presented a comparison between imagination and perception and we learned that stimulating the imaginations of consumers is like stimulating them directly. At the end, Néstor Braidot talked about the future of the field and what impact it may have on various levels. He also mentioned that in order to do marketing you have to listen, not just to hear, and you have to look, not just to see.
Prof. Victor Lamme (CEO of Neurensics, Professor at the University of Amsterdam) had an interesting presentation about predicting the effect of TV commercials at a world wide basis. Together with their research them, they have found a neuronal signature of effective global commercials are now able to classify with around 88% accuracy in any TV commercial (and around 65% accuracy in predition from a storyboard), which helps in developing the winning commercials that trigger desire, expectation, trust and value. This also applies to identifying the effectiveness of a storyboard or concept, as the same brain pattern is activated when seeing storyboards and the final production. You may read more about their research in a previous posthere.
They found out that effectiveness is characterized by high desire, lust, expectation, trust and value, and that effective TV commercials evoke positive emotions without the viewer beoming aware or involved, as it ‘silently’ communicates value, builds trust and expectation.
Next, Elissa Moses (EVP, Neuroscience and Emotion, Ipsos) and Carl Marci (CEO/ChiefScience Officer, Innerscope) talked about what clients what and how business applies biometrics for better marketing, proving how neuro and traditional tols come together to provide deep actionable results. They also highlighted the importance of validation of the construct (measuring what you say you measure), reliability (getting the same results over again) and predictability (improving market expectations), but also of collaboration and results sharing. As emotions cause a chain reaction throughout the body, they focus on many biosignals such as brain waves, skin conductance (arousal / excitement and relevance), heart rate (approach or avoid), breathing (boredom, tension, humor), motion (orientation), eye tracking (attention and processing) and facial expressions in order to identify ways to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for consumers. They presented case studies on magazine sales, fashion accesories, predicting the basket size in grocery shopping, and more.
On the next track about new ideas on advertising that concern marketing payback, risks and media planning, Pranav Yadav (CEO of Neuro-Insight U.S.) talked about what the brain tells us about successful multimedia campaigns and how they can be optimized. After stating what traditional methods lack and why it is important to focus on the brain, he talked about right and left hemispheres and about implicit and explicit memories. He also presented the advantages of SST (Steady state topography), the technology they use at Neuro-Insight in order to investigate memory encoding for different stimuli. Pranav Yadav then presented various cases of how media effectiveness can be increased.
Thinkbox, a marketing body for commercial TV in the UK wanted to determine whether creative effectiveness as measured by Neuro-Insight correlated with market place performance. Ebiquity, an econometrics consulting firm, identified pairs of advertisements in 9 product categories. Each pair featured one advertisement known to have a major impact on market performance and one known to have weak impact. Using SST, Neuro-Insight measured each pair of ads among 120 respondents. In 8 of 9 pairs, a combination of Memory Encoding and Emotional intensity metrics was able to identify the more succesfull advertisements. Measured differences in Memory Encoding were high for more major purchases – automobiles, home improvements and home electronics.
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