What is neuroscience and why is it important for marketers?

Graham Page
Neuroscience methods are increasingly being used by marketers to investigate some of the things that people find a little harder to articulate, some of the things that people find more difficult to tell us about in conventional qualitative or quantitative research. 

I think in research such as questionnaire-based work, focus groups, people are very good at telling you about outcomes, so how, what has happened, how they felt about things, how they, you know, what they thought about it. But the processes by which they get there are very difficult to understand using some of the conventional research methods. So that’s why we turn to neuroscience methods such as the work done at Bangor University to understand some of those things in more detail in a way that we can’t get to through other means.

Jane Raymond
fMRI research allows us to really look inside the brain. There’s lots of things that people do that look identical from the outside and you can’t really tell what’s going on in the inside.  So, fMRI scanning in general is very useful for looking at the different kinds of brain processes that people use when they're engaged in thinking.

A lot of people use different analogies to describe what goes on in the brain and what is consciousness and what is outside of consciousness.  A popular analogy is the iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is what you’re conscious of, that’s the thought processes that you, sort of, can be aware of, your feelings that you can think about, but what goes on under the surface is this great, large amorphous set of processes and that’s the subconscious or the unconscious.

This is an outdated view. We have many tools now to study what goes on under the surface and so this analogy is maybe passé. Perhaps a better analogy is one of the theatre.

The things on the stage are your ideas, your thoughts at the moment, perhaps even your feelings at the moment, but in the background there are stagehands, there are, there’s an audience, there’s a director and there are various mechanisms or networks of activity going on to support the ongoing play which is your conscious awareness. 

We can take it into fMRI studies and look at the different networks of activity that get activated in the brain, not single areas, but rather whole sets of areas that work like an orchestra to produce a kind of melody or a whole rhythm of activity that helps and supports your consciousness, which then of course translates into your active behaviour. Things like choosing what to buy.

Graham Page
To build on the theatre analogy I think there’s some useful learning there for marketers, which is that marketing communications, such as direct mail or other forms of advertising, kind of need to get on to the stage to have an effect and that’s an important reason why engagement is so important. And secondly again brands also kind of need to be on stage when people are making decisions, when they’re making their purchasing choices.  And again a lot of brand strength comes from the ability of the brand to be centre stage at the right time in the decision-making process. So that’s why I think understanding some of these processes, understanding where their marketing communications is, getting into the spotlight as it were is a key thing for marketers to understand.

Building on that, from a marketer’s point of view, understanding the emotional processing that’s going on when people are encountering marketing I think is important in two areas because we know there are two main areas where emotion is important in brand decisions.  One is clearly it’s a fundamental part of a brand’s representation.

Brands which are emotionally positive, which evoke positive feelings are more likely to be stronger brands, more likely to be purchased in market because they’re brands that people are drawn towards. 

Secondly there’s also the role that emotion has in directing and enhancing engagement with the marketing message.  So we know that it’s a key cue for the brain to devote mental resources to a stimulus or something in the marketplace.  So if you get emotional engagement with advertising you’ll get engagement with that piece of communication. 

So on both levels we need to understand the nature of the emotional processing that people have when they encounter a piece of marketing such as a piece of direct mail.