Marketing and Neuroscience - a Match Made in Heaven

Imagine that you're walking through the grocery store snack aisle and you pick a bag of tortilla chips over the bag of pretzels. You chose the tortilla chips because you like the taste better than the pretzels, right?

That may have been your conscious decision, but your brain was busy making a million other subconscious observations while you were debating which product tastes better. You probably picked the chips over the pretzels for a reason you weren’t even consciously aware of, but marketers spending big bucks to analyze your brain waves, blood flow and eye movements sure are.

Our brains process 11 million bits of information every second, and only 40 bits of that information is processed consciously. Conscious deliberation really is the exception rather than the rule. With unrelenting competition in the marketplace, companies are anxious to find out exactly how to get consumers to choose their products and are teaming up with neuroscientists to get to the root of the matter.

Neuroscience is the indirect measure of a person’s response, either about things people don’t want to reveal or to factors people aren’t aware of or don’t realize have influenced them. The various tools measure attention, emotion and memory, and marketers are applying the scientific findings to branding, product development, packaging design, advertising and in-store displays.

The presenters shared some “neurological best practices” for advertising, and since I don’t have access to the funds it takes to hook up our target audiences to brain wave machines, I found the tips to be particularly helpful.

General audience: 

• Images on the left and text on the right are easier for our brain to process


• Minimize visual clutter


• Use interesting fonts and font treatments, but none that are too difficult to process


• Lead with emotion


• Motion, novelty, error, ambiguity and simple puzzles capture attention


• Use as many senses as possible


• Emphasize your product’s link to the natural world


• Embed the product

Women . . .

• Are attracted to images of women in groups, especially when they are shown enjoying a shared activity


• Engage faster with faces that are looking directly at them


• Process language more fluently then men, so text-based ads work

 Men are . . .

• Impulsive shoppers, so short and focused messages work well


• Attracted to images of advancement and success


• Attracted to spatial imagery

 ~ Nicole