As the experience economy transforms into the values and emotion economy, neuromarketing in CX may offer the deep customer insights needed to drive the evolution of customer experience in five key areas and close the experience gap.
The sobering reality of the experience gap is that although 80% of companies feel that they deliver great customer experiences, only about 8% of customers agree. As with any problem or challenge, the experience gap is also an opportunity.
The holy grail of marketing has always been to get into the consumer’s head, as we’ve seen in TV and movies from What Women Want to Mad Men.
Marketers are always looking for the next golden insight to create the perfect marketing campaigns and ads.
Strike the right emotional cords and play the siren song to drive record sales.
Cement brand recognition.
Conquer market share.
Anyway, that’s the fantasy.
What is neuromarketing in CX?
Neuromarketing is the scientific study of how the brain responds to branding and advertising. Neuromarketing uses insights from neuroscience, behavioral economics, and social psychology, applying them to measure and improve the effectiveness of product design, branding, and marketing practices.
Understanding and predicting consumer behavior is one of the greatest obstacles to successful marketing efforts. Market research methods such as interviews, surveys, and focus groups have been valuable ways of gathering data, but they still leave guesswork and uncertainty for marketers trying to figure out what consumers want, and why.
Neuromarketing in CX can provide insights into human behavior that can be applied across your organization, from achieving executive alignment to stronger cross-function communication and collaboration to improving employee and customer experience.
Getting to the heart of the (gray) matter: Consumer decisions are human decisions
The same primordial heuristics that have guided millennia of human decision-making behavior are with us today, now hardwired into the emotions that influence our every decision and course of action, from what clothes to wear today to what brand of soup to buy.
Only a few years ago neuromarketing had been thrown into the dustbin of history’s fads and bad ideas with phrenology and other pseudosciences.
Some promoted it as a revolutionary way to dig into the consumer’s unconscious psyche to all but force them to buy more widgets. No wonder the idea of neuromarketing might sound sketchy. If that sounds like a simultaneous overhype and oversimplification of neuromarketing, that’s because it is.
However, attitudes have been changing. Research continues and bodies of knowledge grow. Technologies are developing. More marketers see the value and potential of applied neuromarketing insights. Recently, companies such as Google, Facebook, NBC, TimeWarner, and Microsoft have all formed in-house neuromarketing teams.
Research has shown self-reporting is notoriously inaccurate. Several problems from a slew of biases to the non-conscious nature of our motivations and behaviors often render our self-reporting problematic and misguiding. We don’t have conscious access to our own mental states as clearly and directly as we think we do.
This presents problems as well as explanations for the performance of many of the foundational marketing research methods.
Marketers have been aware of the misalignment between self-report data gathered and actual consumer behavior for a long time but understanding the root of the problem is a huge step toward its solution. The promise of using brain science technologies such as fMRI and EEG is to reveal non-conscious emotional reactions that consumers may not even be able to articulate, solving a lot of the guesswork.
Emotion drives CX
Marketers have been aware of the powerful role of emotion in consumer behavior for a long time. Appealing to emotional triggers is nothing new, as Tracey Wallace said. It’s a strategy as old as marketing – most of us have felt the thrill (and the regret) of an impulse buy.
The research that informs neuromarketing theory and methods demonstrates that our decision-making processes aren’t as purely rational as we like to believe.
After ages of privileging certain strains of reason over emotion, the knee-jerk reaction is to assume that owning our emotional nature is somehow a bad thing; a disappointment.
The irony here is that the snap reaction and sense of disappointment arises from the part of our brain responsible for leveraging the best features of intuitive emotional response.
Ultimately, emotion arising from our unconscious impressions of environmental cues sets reason and deliberation into motion, which is guided to a decision that is then confirmed emotionally.
5 ways neuromarketing in CX will drive the future of business
The experience economy continues to evolve alongside the development and integration of digital automation tools driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Our understanding and appreciation for the essential role of emotion is also evolving, and that emotion influences how we negotiate everyday life, drives everything we do – from social and professional interaction to brand engagement to purchasing decisions and other life choices.
Competing in the experience economy on the basis of customer experience demands businesses to create great end-to-end customer experiences from initial engagement to purchase to service and beyond. According to Pete Trainor, “Personalization is starting to get really prescriptive because of big data in digital experiences. The data is there now to create highly relevant experiences which in turn can enrich a consumer experience.”
Here are some key areas that will see great improvement with the integration of neuromarketing insights to drive deeper and better customer experiences:
- Trust, values, relationship: Earning and keeping your customer’s trust is a must when 82% of U.S. consumers (and 75% of global consumers) say they will stay with a brand they trust, and even pay more (63% U.S., 59% globally). Loyal customers are your best brand advocates with 78% recommending your brand if someone asks. An increasingly important requirement for earning and keeping consumer trust is to understand their values.
- Product innovation and improvement: It’s not like neuromarketing is this creepy workaround to bypass your customer’s ability to reason. You still have to offer a good product. You still have to improve your product. Neuromarketing will allow you to leverage what you learn to innovate and grow with your customers, to adjust earlier in the design and development process to reduce costs, increase sales, and have happier customers.
- Branding, creating strong emotional associations: Here’s where most of the neuromarketing has been used so far. Since brand is conceptual, an idea constructed and articulated in consumers’ brains, creating and reinforcing positive emotional associations through every means possible is how the mere idea of Coca-Cola was enough to evoke positive reactions in a taste test compared to the neutral reaction when the test was blind. This is where the web of brand associations is built and then cues initiate unconscious feelings and mental states that inform, drive, and confirm conscious decision-making and action. Sometimes it’s using different color or font or going from a shiny to a matte finish on the packaging. Maybe it’ll be something else for our brand. And neuromarketing will be an increasingly valuable solution to enable these game-changing moves.
- Marketing and advertising: Related to branding, of course, as it is the vehicle for your branding. Neuromarketing data will guide creation of more effective marketing programs. Develop more nuanced marketing strategies based on consumer response to marketing materials using a vast array of variables from segments to seasons to times of day to delivery channels to styles and basic emotional engagement with the aesthetic and content of your marketing messaging.
- UX/UI, shopping/retail/e-commerce: Create better user experiences by making it easier and more intuitive to engage your company across all channels and easier and more convenient and enjoyable to buy. It can be as simple as combining usability testing and neuromarketing data to make major improvements in KPIs and boost ROI, or as complex as designing and developing an entirely new digital enterprise.
Leveraging neuromarketing in CX will grant the insights to connect emotionally with customers throughout the entire journey, at every touchpoint and on every channel, and will transform the future of customer experience.
Understanding your customers more deeply and holistically with the aid of neuroscience has breakthrough potential for closing the experience gap.
