Brand marketing with neuroscience
Brand marketing has a validation problem. Marketers are notorious for providing vanity metrics to please their superiors, but they don’t really know whether their actions contribute to brand growth. Is the campaign on-message? Is the ad on-brand? Without testing their assumptions, marketers can only guess.
Heat maps and other analytical tools provide data but offer little behavioral insight (we know what people did, but we don’t know why). Surveys and focus groups are common ways to gauge consumer response to stimuli like ads or packaging, however, these methods rely on conscious self-reporting, which can be biased and inaccurate.
People don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.
—David Ogilvy
Neuroscience provides reliable ways to measure engagement and retention, but the existing methods are either cumbersome, expensive, or both.
EEG (electroencephalogram) involves placing caps with electrodes on people’s heads and measuring electrical pulses in response to sensory stimuli. The data requires professional interpretation, and testing at scale is challenging. (Hundreds of people hooked up to devices is not the best PR.)
Effective, but
The most useful mind decoding sci-tech, as of 2024, is functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which has similar limitations. fMRI machines need to be operated by specialists, they can accommodate only one person at a time, and the costs limit scale.
But there are more than a few ways to determine what people think about something. In his Nobel Prize-winning work, the late Daniel Kahneman described the thinking mind as two systems. System 1 is instinctive and intuitive (thinking fast); it’s in charge of mundane thought and deals with familiar circumstances. System 2 takes over when we’re faced with something outstanding that requires deeper thought and reflection (thinking slow). You’re using System 1 to answer this: 2+2=?, and System 2 to calculate this: 37×3=?
We like to believe that we contemplate each one of our decisions, but the reality is that up to 95% of all decisions are in the domain of System 1, which forms decisions based on well-learned facts and existing information stored in our brains.
Thinking fast,
thinking slow
In a tale of a science-inspired venture, Kahneman’s theory paved the way for an enterprise product developed by a neuro.marketing company called Mindspeller.
By registering people’s implicit associations (System 1 thinking) to visual or auditory stimuli and mapping out the data in a semantic association
network (the collective subconscious), Mindspeller provides marketers with actionable insights that enable educated decisions.
Each concept, campaign, or creative assumption can be tested and validated with the accuracy of the more expensive methods for a fraction of the cost and none of the baggage.
Competitive
comparison
I was tasked with formulating and communicating Mindspeller’s value proposition to one of its prospective clients—Coca-Cola. The marketing powerhouse was considering a facelift for one of its brands, Simply Juices, and its objective was to reaffirm Simply’s positioning as THE healthy, clean, and natural juice brand.
Using Mindspeller’s competitive research tools, I compared the label of Simply’s main seller (Simply Orange) with one of the alternatives provided by CMA (the design agency that created the options). Since the intended brand association was fresh and simple, I chose a label with a green outline and an image of a split-open orange at the center. The changes might seem trivial, but my assumption was that their location and association communicated the intended message without disrupting the familiar brand image (earned brand equity).
Which one is (more) on message?
To validate my hypothesis, I mapped two labels (added them to Mindspeller’s map of the subconscious mind): the alternative label I selected and Simply’s current label, which I used as a baseline. To test which option was closer to the intended message, I used three of Mindspeller’s analytical tools.
First, I used the A/B tool to uncover which concept evoked a stronger association with the intended “Natural” association. The result (on a scale of 0 to 10) was a score of 7.61 for the alternative version on the left, compared to a score of 6.86 for the current label on the right. (A delta above .20 is significant enough to be meaningful.)
The second tool I used was the Competitive Profiler to highlight the first-order associations that set the options apart. The length of the bar represents the intensity of the mental connection with a specific word, relative to the asset on the other side. (The Competitive Profiler shows only associations with the most pronounced variations.) The results showed that the option on the right does not evoke strong associations, whereas the option on the left (the alternative) evokes a few strong ones.
In addition to the comparison, I ran both assets through Mindspeller’s Association Wheel, which shows people’s implicit associations with an asset. Here as well, the alternative asset evoked more relevant associations, although not by much.
The location of an asset in our collective subconscious shows how people truly perceive it. Mindspeller’s SaaS tools reveal implicit associations from a few different angles and provide marketers with ways to measure the impact of their actions on brand growth. Every brand, picture, tagline, or sound can be tested, and every strategic decision can be validated using the NaaS (Neuromarketing as a Service) platform.
The era of guessing has ended, and the era of actionable insights has begun. Science has enabled marketers to
shape the brand in the mind.
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