Tag Archives: NeuroFocus

How are Neuromarketing Companies Marketing Themselves…

The Neuromarketing Frontier

The field of neuromarketing is actually still very young. Although cognitive neuroscience has been researched for decades, neuroscience as it pertains to perception and decision-making in business is still in its infancy.

My research and experience with neuromarketing has taught me a few important things about the nature of this field. Before assuming the role that I am currently in now, I was actually looking to go back to school to obtain a PhD in neuromarketing. Over the past 18 months as I searched school by prestigious school I noticed something, there were little to no neuromarketing PhD programs – largely because there were little to no professors of neuromarketing.

as we see more and more neuromarketing research used in business today it will eventually lead to neurobased classes in business schools around the nation.

Although specific research was being conducted at schools like Emory, Cal Berkley and many more, there was little academic support for neuromarketing as a major program inside business schools. This confused me as I continued to read study after mind-blowing study regarding neuromarketing, and then it hit me. The university labs that were conducting these studies were academic partners with major corporate sponsors and neuromarketing companies.

Where is Neuromarketing Research Coming From?

Companies like NeuroFocus, Buyology Inc., Sands Research, EmSense, and The Consumer Neuroscience Division of Millward Brown have been directing this field and driving neuromarketing research for all. As neuromarketing becomes a more familiar research tool for companies, these will be the names that businesses most likely to turn to improve their marketing effectiveness.

And suddenly you’re hit with a new and exciting thought – how do the companies that provide neuromarketing consulting effectively market to their customers in this new and soon to be highly competitive market? This is the beauty and superb difficulty of marketing and sales strategy that all companies face in varying capacities.

Neuromarketing companies, better than most, are supposed to understand the scientific process of marketing design, communication, and strategic execution – so it very exciting to see how they will approach business development in this new market. And it would seem that some of these companies are starting to make their first strategic marketing moves already.

NeuroStandards and The Law of Leadership

A month ago I came across a press release that announced that the world’s largest neuromarketing firm NeuroFocus had created NeuroStandards, the first and only set of scientifically sound principles for conducting EEG-based, full-brain measurements intended for application to market research studies. As I read the press release I recognized that this was no ordinary press announcement. It was also a strategic marketing move, and a very good one at that.

Highly Recommended Reading. The Buying Brain and Buyology are examples of how neuromarketing companies are leveraging education and knowledge to reach their consumers. Buyology was written by Buyology Inc. Founder Martin Lindstrom, and The Buying Brain was written by NeuroFocus CEO Dr. A.K. Pradeep. The Buying Brain gives excellent insight into basic neuroscience principles and leads wonderfully into concepts and trends that are currently at the forefront of neuromarketing.

The Law of Leadership is a term that comes from Al Ries and Jack Trout’s book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and builds off of positioning strategy. The core lesson behind positioning strategy is that it doesn’t matter where you’re at in the market place, but more importantly where you’re at in the mind of the consumer.

The Law of Leadership is the rule for the importance, and advantages, of being first in a product category in the mind of the consumer, and the marketing behaviors a company should take when widely recognized as a leader. And that brings us back to NeuroFocus, because in the past year they have been continually recognized as the world’s leading neuromarketing firm.

What stood out about NeuroStandards is that it was a press release that presented standards for conducting neuromarketing research for an entire industry. Rather than boast their own standards for research, NeuroFocus effectively positioned themselves firmly in the mind of the consumer as the leader by educating the consumer as well as other neuromarketing companies on best practices for the industry – something they can leverage in sales processes moving forward.

if you're the leader, just don't grow your slice of the pie. grow the entire pie!

For example if the neuromarketing industry was a pie and each neuromarketing company was a slice that makes up the pie, as the leader it doesn’t make any sense to grow just your slice of the pie. It actually makes more sense to grow the pie as a whole – thus indirectly growing your slice of the pie. By using NeuroStandards, NeuroFocus was able to effectively communicate their role as the leader by providing industry-recognized education for all.

The Emerging Role of Education in Marketing

Today’s consumers are smarter than they have ever been.  The Internet has drastically reshaped business by allowing people to research and compare every product, service, and company. This has prompted companies to add another layer, education, to their marketing and branding strategies.

I’ll end this post with a bit of sales and marketing advice that has helped me over the years. Provide education relevant to your customers, and sell industry knowledge just as much as you sell your products and services. Consumers are hungry for knowledge relating to their emotional buying intent and interests. So give them what they want, especially if you’re the one leading the pack.

Thank you for reading!

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Is your Message Brain-Friendly?

5 Tips for Designing Brain-Friendly Presentations and Advertisements

You’ve got something important to say. We all do. And it doesn’t matter if you work in education, advertising, sales or a local coffee shop; you just want to make sure your message isn’t falling on deaf ears.  The trick to communicating a successful message is not to place all the emphasis on what you’re saying. The real trick is to understand how your message is being perceived. However, very few people, teachers, companies, and organizations understand the importance of communicating in a brain-friendly manner.

Recent neuromarketing research conducted by NeuroFocus, the world’s leading neuromarketing firm, has shed light on the startling gap created by a lack of brain-friendly design in today’s society.  “We have found that about 75% of all content – not just advertisements — is not neurologically optimal,” Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus added. “The opportunity to improve is tremendous.” I could not agree more with Dr. Pradeep’s stance on seeking to improve the content and delivery of our messages.

We spend a lot of time crafting our messages to get them out to our audiences. When our messages aren’t understood we normally do two things. The first thing we do is repeat our message and if that doesn’t work we amplify our message. That’s the equivalent of me speaking gibberish, repeating my gibberish, and finally screaming my gibberish at the top of my lungs in hopes that you somehow get what I’m talking about. It sounds pretty crazy huh? Neuroscience has provided us with some great tips that can make your message and your delivery more efficient so you’re not wasting time and money.

Tip #1: Simplify Your Message

I could have easily titled this article “How to Create Neurologically Optimal Designs”, but that’s too much work for most people’s brains to process, especially if you’re not familiar with neuroscience. Most marketers make the mistake that their audience is just as familiar with their goods and services as they are. Break that knowledge bubble and begin to understand how your audience perceives not just your company, but your industry. Then you can begin to craft a consistently simple yet relevant message that could be absorbed with greater ease.

Remember that we have three main areas of the brain. The neo-cortex of the brain is the area that allows us to think in great depth and possibility about an idea or a message, but the part of the brain (reptilian brain) that decides to act on that idea relies heavily on emotion and simplicity.

This may include simplifying your offering as well. If you present people with two choices you have a much better chance at getting your desired outcome than if you presented someone with three choices or more. Boil your message down and perfect it. Avoid the marketing/sales mistake of “showing up and throwing up”. You’re offering may be bountiful, but sometimes showing all that you offer can turn off or overwhelm your customer who often times is only looking for one thing. Start with your customer’s most urgent and immediate need, present to it, solve it, and then move onto to their next important need.

Tip #2: Match Your Font, With Your Message

This is for those graphic designers out there. With an infinite amount of fonts in your design arsenals you should know the power your font can actually carry. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about [Drake Bennett, Easy = True, 2010].  This has been proven in studies where participants were asked to rate the difficulty of a workout regiment. The regiment typed in less legible font was perceived as more difficult compared to the same regiment typed in a simpler font. Surprisingly, a questionnaire presented in a less legible font is more likely to have people answer it less honestly that if it is written in a more legible one.

My best advice is to decide the goal of your presentation or advertisement. Do you want to grab someone’s attention or do you want to pass along information? Knowing the overall desired outcome allows you to become more attuned to the font you choose. For example, if you’re presenting to parents and teachers on a 5 step process for getting children to eat healthier you had best pick a font in your handouts that easy to read, and I’m not talking about “Comic Sans”.

Tip #3: Be Contextual

I can’t express the importance of contextual advertising. The best product placement advertisements are the ones that people never meant to happen. Think about the Air Jordan basketball shoes. How many of us watched Michael Jordan play, noticed the shoes he’s wearing, saw how good he played and went out and bought a pair? I know I did. It’s one thing to show a picture of your products. It’s another thing to show your products in actual use. If I look at a picture of a product, it’s just a product in my mind. If I see the product in use I see an experience, and I have my own experiences that I can relate it to.

"it's gotta be the shoes"

Tip #4: Placement of Stats, Pictures, and Logos

People interpret information on different parts of a screen with different sections of their brains.  Stimuli in the left visual field are interpreted with by the right frontal lobe, while stimuli on the right are picked up by the left frontal lobe [Kee. 2008]. What does this mean? The right (creative) side of your brain is very good at interpreting imagery, whereas the left (analytical) side of your brain is particularly good at processing numerical information and semantics.

You see with your brain. Not with your eyes. As you can see here your visual pathways cross as they relay the stimuli they're perceiving back to the brain.

Logos and pictures would stand a better chance of being perceived if placed on the left side of advertisements. Statistical information and financial projections would best served on the right side of the screen for presentations. This is a simple yet powerful fact in brain-friendly design.

Tip #5: Engage Your Audience Emotionally

Don’t just make people think. Make them Feel. Emotion helps you gain attention. Emotion helps you learn with greater ease. Emotion makes you memorable in the mind of your audience. Emotion can take many forms and can be a powerful aid so long as it’s relevant with your message: tell a story, crack a joke, create a mini-drama or even use a prop, but whatever you do avoid the norm. Understand that attention and retention is strongest at the beginning and end of your message. So leverage your emotions properly.

John Medina, author of Brain Rules, became an award winning professor because of his work in neuromolecular biology and his understanding of how to properly apply emotion into his lessons. The passing of knowledge doesn’t have to be tasking. Science backs up the fact that people learn and retain more when they’re emotionally engaged. John’s solution was to break a 50 minute class period up by 10 minute increments using an emotional tactics like jokes, stories and role-play. The emotional pace of the class was enjoyable and his students succeeded because they were engaged. Makes you think twice about giving the same old power point doesn’t it?

Brain-Friendly Beginnings

These are only just a few tips on improving your visual presentation of your ideas and messages. Hopefully as you’re sitting at your desk, in your office, or at your computer you’ll get a chance to practice some of these tips. The importance in communication should not be placed on what you’re saying, but rather how your message is being perceived. It’s not the market place, the media, or the internet; what matters most is where you are at in the mind of your audience. Be different, be memorable, and above all be genuine. Best of luck to you and thank you for reading.