Have you ever heard about neuromarketing? If the answer is “no”, then you might want to take a few minutes to look into what might just be the next cornerstone of business success in the Caribbean.
Have you ever found yourself working until the early hours of the morning over a very important campaign, pouring all your experience and talent into it, using all the different tools possible to ensure its success, just to see it all go wrong in the end? If you’ve been in the business long enough, chances are the answer is “yes”.
Uncertainty is the name of the game in our line of business. The problem is that no matter how much work you put into a campaign, you can never know in advance what the results will be. Or at least that’s what we’ve always thought. Everyone would love to have a ‘magic wand’ to limit uncertainty, and to measure and assess the way in which consumers and customers will react to a campaign and interact with a brand, before the campaign is launched. So what if I told you that what you are looking for is not a ‘magic wand’, but an approach to marketing that already exists?
Neuromarketing is a new discipline that allows us to investigate the subconscious mechanisms that drive consumer decision-making processes – mechanisms, that is, which account for 95% of consumer action.
This new approach offers the resources necessary to investigate the physiological subconscious response mechanisms of consumers to an infinite gamma of stimuli. Sounds too good to be true? Let’s take two senses, vision and smell. Which one would you naturally assume to have a bigger impact on the likelihood of a customer purchasing one brand over another in a given shop? You probably answered “vision”, in which case you are wrong. Research shows that, on average, we remember 5% of what we see, as opposed to 35% of what we smell. What does this mean in practical terms? In a study carried by Nike, two identical pairs of shoes were positioned in two different rooms, the first one was infused with a delightful fragrance, and the second one was odourless. Guess what, 84% of customers expressed a preference towards the first pair of shoes – in spite of the fact that you would assume the odour of the ambiance to be unrelated to the product itself.
Want another example? Did you know that putting your clients in a good mood can tangibly influence their purchasing behaviour? For instance, giving gifts to your clients as soon as they arrive, such as flowers, can shift their attention from the price of a product to its appeal and desirability, thus increasing the likelihood of purchase.
The importance of “random acts of kindness” has been well-understood by leading European airline KLM, as the following video illustrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk
The tools to knowing what people want before they do are within reach. Neuromarketing offers new insights into how to build our businesses around our clients, getting to know them better than they know themselves – and maybe nowhere is this more important than in the seemingly unpredictable melange of Caribbean identities that stem of culturally diverse backgrounds of our region.
