Diving Into the Consumer's Mind: Tools, Roles, and Ethical Concerns of Neuromarketing

Introduction

“It's simple for organizations to keep track of what we buy, but it's more difficult to figure out why,” says Reshma Ghorpade (2017). A marketer is constantly thinking about how to persuade consumers to purchase their product even though we all make conscious and unconscious decisions each day. The solution to this enigmatic query could be found in the emerging field of neuroscience in marketing, where various techniques can ascertain consumer experiences without directly posing questions. Conscious and unconscious behaviour are separated by a wide chasm. People's actions can be seen to contradict what they say and remember. “Notice the paradox: while Ratan Tata and his marketing team believed they were offering Indians a car at a very low price, Indian customers felt that their ego had been hurt!” as in figure 1. Most of the time, we make decisions without thinking about them. To predict and influence purchasing behaviour as a marketer, we must first comprehend how the brain functions. Spending on advertising campaigns totals billions of dollars annually. Nevertheless, traditional and conventional approaches to evaluating and projecting the success of those investments frequently fall short because they rely too heavily on consumers' ability and willingness to express their reactions to advertisements. On the other hand, cutting-edge approaches to mind-reading without demanding cognitive or conscious participation are provided by neuromarketing. It is critical for a marketer to understand the emotional forces that drive a customer to make a purchasing decision. So, neuromarketing gives businesses access to this crucial and beneficial information. It seeks to penetrate the depths of the customer's mind and brain to draw out particular emotions and feelings that serve as the true catalysts for a purchasing decision. Similar to this, responses to an advertisement could be gathered regarding the type of thought process a viewer is generating while looking at the advertisement.

The application of neuroscience to contemporary marketing is known as neuromarketing. According to the book ‘Neuromarketing Exploring the Brain of the Consumer,’ neuromarketing is a commercial promoting communication field that uses neuropsychology for statistical surveying, focusing on purchasers' intellectual and emotional reactions to brand purchases. Neuromarketing seeks to understand the reasoning behind how retail consumer makes purchasing decisions and their reactions to changes in applying those learnings in the marketing domain. The potential benefits to a marketer of incorporating more proficient and compelling market promotional efforts and methodologies, as well as the control of individuals' genuine requirements and need to suit the necessities (Arun Kumar and N. Meenakshi,2011). Marketers' focus is shifting from organising a business to organising exclusive or personalised retail consumer groups in the current environment. Various experiments have revealed that neuromarketing methods play a significant role in creating communication campaigns to meet the needs of retail customers. It is a marketing development trend that has emerged in the present time with a notable action in the sale of goods or services to end users. The neuromarketing approach is an important part of an individual's mindset before taking advantage of a purchasing opportunity (Suomala et al., 2012).

Figure 1.

Neuromarketing

Source: (Mansor & Isa, 2020)