The benefits of psychology to our knowledge are unsuspected. As the decades go by, advances in psychology are being used by the world of sports, medicine, education, and especially advertising and marketing.

Neuromarketing is a relatively new discipline, which tries to create effective marketing campaigns from the knowledge we have about the human mind; specifically, the brain. Does this discipline work? The results may surprise you…

Neuromarketing: Entering the Consumer’s Brain

It all started with the creation of a very simple technology: the biofeedback . For many decades, psychologists have been trying to learn more and more about human behaviour and its mental processes by analysing physiological reactions , such as tension, electrical impulse, sweat, pupil dilation, etc.. This is how biofeedback arises, which consists of, through what we know about these registers, making it possible for the person to learn to relax or to control his state of anxiety by means of a small device that informs him about his physiological state with a sound or light.

It is very simple: the person lies down, puts his or her fingers on comfortable sensors attached to the small device and listens to a high-pitched sound. As he relaxes, the sound becomes lower and slower. This simple technology is not only useful for learning to relax… but for much more. This is where the Neuromarketing comes in.

Why do some advertising campaigns not work?

Marketers and advertisers were tired of feeling how what was supposed to work in the minds of consumers didn’t work. Perhaps the problem was that they didn’t know enough about how the human mind works. So they began to practice neuromarketing.

How? The marketers began to apply the knowledge of psychology in their studies , and using the technology in sensory registers, decided to study what advertising was most effective on people (using sensors on the test persons, such as measuring pupil response, eye movements, circulation, etc.). The results were very surprising…

Do the campaigns that tell us that tobacco kills work?

For years, there have been campaigns that, with disastrous and very unpleasant photos on cigarette packs, tell us that smoking kills, causes impotence or can destroy our teeth. However, the number of smokers is not decreasing. Is addiction the only culprit? Neuromarketing decided to study this case and discovered something surprising… This advertising increases the desire to smoke. The explanation is simple. The researchers showed the photographs and messages to both smokers and non-smokers.

For non-smokers, the images were very unpleasant, and their physiological reactions indicated this. However, these people are not smokers, so they have no real relevance to tobacco consumption. The curious thing came when smokers saw the pictures. By reading the word “smoking” and seeing images related to smoke, certain memories were activated in their brain and the desire to smoke increased . Modern technology allowed researchers to demonstrate this.

Advertising that works: Harley Davidson

Harley Davidson is a classic motorcycle brand, with a very powerful image, even though they are not the motorcycles that anyone buys. They are very exclusive motorcycles, not the fastest or most powerful. However, the image of the brand is quickly associated with freedom, a way of life, speed and personal power.

The researchers wanted to check how powerful the image of Harley Davidson was, which is usually the motorcycle accompanied by a biker with a beard and long hair. The experiment consisted of viewing photographs of various well-known characters, including a biker with his Harley Davidson. The result of the experiment was the following: the Harley Davidson brand awakens the same areas in the brain as when a person visualizes an image of Jesus Christ. The brand has been associated with so much commitment and for so many years to freedom and a detached and genuine way of life, that just by keeping that image they gain followers, whether they are bikers or not.

Neuromarketing, in short, is a way of bringing scientific advances in psychology closer to disciplines such as marketing , whose main priority is to know people, their tastes, personality and real needs. The aim: to make advertising more honest, effective and efficient, reaching interested people without breaking in where it is not well received. To achieve this, what we know about our mind is a fundamental knowledge.