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What every marketer needs to know about
neuromarketing
BY MARKETING ON 28 APRIL 2014
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In this guest post, branding expert Dr Peter Steidl says neuromarketing will change the face
of marketing, and without it, campaigns will lag behind competitors that have embraced
this new way of thinking about consumer behaviour and branding.
I am not talking about lab tests that deliver reliable but limited information about how consumers
process marketing stimuli such as ads, logos or package designs. Rather, I’m referring to the
application of neuroscience concepts in a strategic context. In other words, how marketers can
benefit from the latest insights into how consumers think, feel and, and most importantly, make
purchase decisions.
The application of neuroscience lifts the effectiveness of marketing, brand, communications,
shopper marketing, pricing and innovation strategies – including, of course, social and other
digital media strategies.
To give substance to this claim, let me present a very brief overview on three important
neuroscience insights, highlighting a number of important marketing implications.
Insight 1: consumers have two parallel circuits in their mind, one for thinking and one for
doing
Nobel Prize Laureate Daniel Kahneman simply called them System 1 and System 2, although
marketers may want to think about these circuits as the consumer’s ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ minds,
respectively.
In System 1, the person’s non-conscious ‘doing’ mind, we find memories of past sensory
stimulations (such as ads, purchase and consumption experiences, word-of-mouth, etc), emotions,
rules of thumb, stereotypes, archetypes, associations, visual images, spontaneous behaviour (such
as impulse or habitual buying), intuition, non-verbal communications and more.
Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman suggests that 95% of purchase decisions are made by the nonconscious ‘doing’ mind.
System 2, the person’s conscious ‘thinking’ mind, facilitates thinking by providing working
memory to process verbal messages, to evaluate the cost-benefit of options, and to plan ahead
(eg. preparing a supermarket shopping list). This is the system that responds in surveys and group
discussions when consumers try to explain why they do the things they do.
The ‘doing’ mind is fast and powerful and can do millions of things concurrently. Importantly,
the ‘doing’ mind decides which of the billions of sensory inputs the brain receives will be stored
in memory. To do this, the ‘doing’ mind has to assign meaning and value to these inputs, as it has
to decide which existing memories the new memories are to be linked to.
The ‘thinking’ mind, in contrast, is slow and can only focus on one task at a time.
Not surprisingly then, to be successful marketers typically have to make an impact on the ‘doing’
mind that is driving most purchase decisions.
Here are just three important implications:
First, System 1 marketing – marketing activity aiming at the consumer’s non-conscious ‘doing’
mind – is of particular importance when consumers are:

repeat buying,

buying something that is not of great importance to them,

are under time pressure,

suffering from information overload,

not particularly interested in the matter, and

unsure how to decide (eg. in a situation of commoditisation or complexity).
These criteria apply to the majority of purchases consumers are likely to make during their
lifetime.
Second, measuring the effectiveness of advertising and other marketing initiatives on the basis of
recall, stated purchase intentions, or statements about how the campaign has changed how
consumers feel about the brand is not just unreliable but potentially misleading. The fact is,
consumers do not know what is happening in their non-conscious ‘doing’ mind, yet that’s where
the success or failure of your campaign is being decided!
Third, don’t project the likelihood of consumers buying your new product on the basis of group
discussions or interviews. Consumers simply don’t know what they will do – that’s why 85% of
new products fail, despite having been researched in group discussions and surveys.
Insight 2: the brain is designed to avoid thinking by using shortcuts to make purchase
decisions
The ‘doing’ mind influence extends even further. Having been designed to help us survive in a
hostile natural environment, the ‘doing’ mind has developed energy preservation strategies. And
as the brain – which accounts for only some 3% of body weight – accounts for approximately
20% of all energy consumed, the ‘doing’ mind seems to have focused on finding ingenious
decision shortcuts that eliminate the need for thinking.
These shortcuts are typically presented under the heading of behavioural economics and include
priming and a wide range of judgment heuristics. Here are some examples:

Encourage consumers to first buy fruit and vegetables on their supermarket shopping trip and they
will spend more on packaged goods because of the feel-good factor,

the sound of a cork coming out of a bottle and wine being poured into a glass, played in a bottle
shop, will lift wine sales. Similarly, a very faint lemon smell in a restaurant will boost seafood sales
– but only in cultures where seafood is often served with a slice of lemon,


too much choice is likely to lead to the consumer withdrawing altogether, (ie. not buying at all),
if you want to sell a triple patty burger, put a five patty burger on the menu. Or, like The
Economist,The Age newspaper and undoubtedly many others have done, introduce a subscription
category that makes the one you want to actually sell more attractive, and

when going through the specifications of a new car with a buyer you will sell more features when
starting with a fully specified model and ask the buyer to take options off to reduce the price, rather
than the usual approach of adding options to the base model.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of case studies illustrating how the non-conscious
mind drives consumers down the route of shortcuts by triggering judgment heuristics or by
simply letting primes drive the purchase behaviour.
Consumers using these shortcuts often display irrational behaviour but while this behaviour may
be irrational it is predictable, because the majority of consumers will react in similar ways when a
judgment heuristic is activated or a marketer has primed their decision.
Insight 3: the marketer’s challenge is to shape the consumer’s brand memory
It should be obvious by now that a marketer needs to invest into developing a positive,
emotionally strong brand memory that is linked to one or more of the consumer’s goals.
However, while this seems obvious, current practice is often not aligned with this principle.
Especially when it comes to social media many marketers believe they have a success on their
hands when they look at thousands, possibly millions, of ‘likes’, views, comments and so forth –
ignoring the fact that these may relate to the promotional exposure rather than to the brand itself.
Take ‘Dumb Ways to Die’, the most awarded advertising campaign ever, which was supposed to
reduce the number of significant safety incidents associated with the Melbourne rail system. It
enjoyed a massive number of downloads, viral sharing, likes and so forth – but the safety
statistics in the first six months after the campaign broke showed the worst performance for a
decade. Clearly, the ad created an ad memory, but this ad memory was not linked to the memory
of how to behave.
Similarly, there are numerous examples of viral and social media campaigns that engaged a large
number of consumers but did not have a material impact on sales. The reason: the ad memory
was not linked in the consumer’s mind to the brand memory.
It is important to ensure at all touch points that the brand plays a central, emotionally engaging
role. If that’s not the case, you may get consumers involved but they won’t end up buying your
brand.
Summary of key points
Adopting a neuroscience perspective I would argue that the principle task is not marketing
management, but memory management.
As the flowchart shows, the non conscious ‘doing Mind’ is responsible for screening sensory
inputs including ads, visual images such as logos, product or package designs, emotions,
consumption experiences and so forth, and deciding what to place into memory. To do that, it
must assign value and meaning to the sensory inputs to be able to link new memories to
appropriate established memories.
Sensory inputs may trigger judgment heuristics and prime the decision-making process, which
again is a process that takes place in the consumer’s non-conscious ‘doing’ mind.
Whether the purchase decision is impulse or habitual or deliberate, it is clear that even for
considered purchase decisions the non conscious mind has most likely shaped these decisions
through heuristics and primes.
It follows that marketers need to know how to trigger judgment heuristics, how to prime
consumers and, most importantly, how to make sure touchpoints result in memories that carry the
desired qualities. Most importantly, ‘touchpoint’ memories have to be linked to the brand
memory to impact on purchase decisions.
The good news is that applying neuroscience insights in marketing is neither complicated nor
difficult. It is just a matter of integrating our understanding of how consumers think, feel and
make decisions with well-established marketing concepts and tactics to lift their effectiveness.
Dr Peter Steidl is the founder of Neurothinking.com and an adviser to corporations and
advertising agencies. The second edition of his book Neurobranding, shortlisted as the best
marketing book 2013 by the European Expert Marketer Magazine, has ist been released. He is
also co-author of the recently published Neuromarketing for Dummies (with Stephen J Genco
and Andrew P Pohlmann). He can be contacted via peter@neurothinking.com