FCITR MAGAZINE

FCITR MAGAZINE

Tabrej Khan

Faculty of Computing and Information Technology Rabigh King Abdulaziz University

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Consumer Neuroscience & Neuromarketing Introduction

Neuro marketing Nobel field for the commercial application of neuroscience technologies and explore business further. On the other side, consumer neuroscience can be seen as the academic use of neuroscience to better understand marketing effects on consumer behavior .Neuromarketing will use Cognitive and affective neuroscience. Neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience is a multidisciplinary effort between economics, psychology and neuroscience.

Different way of customer neuroscience, which means how the brain of customers drive their choices, Attention, Conscientiousness, Learning and memory emotion and feelings.

Why we using neuroscience to understand customers?

Traditional methods are using survey, interviews, focus group people are overtly and consciously reporting on their experience and thoughts. Other side, unconscious side of customer behavior is largely unmeasured in the traditional methods. Neuroscience has potential to understand the unconscious part.

For example, one of studies found that how people behaving inside store

Through mobile eye tracking to track where people were looking while they were in store.

Many studies done to track customer behavior like One group exposed to particular ad prior to store and other group did not see particular ad they find that visual attention, the heat map people who exposed view the particular product brand in shelves.

Methods

a)

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

- is using magnetic resonance to image different parts of the body and the brain. First task, he will undergo a so-called resting state task. And in the second one, he will look at different faces. During this task, the, scanner will make a lot of noise, so you'll hear it actually records the brain activation as the person is, experiencing different things and looking at different images. FMI, will measuring the level of oxygen in the blood, and, as a region of the brain has increased brain activation. It consumes oxygen from a region of the brain. What happens then is that, that same region receives a large influx of oxygen rich blood. Which is a signature that we can pick up with the fMRI scanning. fMRi is one of those methods that is readily used in your marketing and consumer neuroscience. It is a really telltale method for how we can understand the brain basis of consumer choice

b)

PET imaging- positron emission tomography scanner

- This is the scanner where we're using radioactive ligands into the bloodstream, or the glucose, or metabolism of the brain of people, and basically imaging how the accumulation of radioactive ligands are occurring in the brain.

Tools

1. Computational Neuroscience—EEG 2. Eye-tracking—fMRI

One of the studies they found that how brand affect customer brain?

Some studies done like brain response to thinking that you are drinking Coca-Cola vers Pepsi cola First researcher allowed people to drink cola while they are in scanner and they scanned people without knowing which brand they were testing.

The more people enjoy cola, stronger activation found in the orbital frontal cortex. This is part of brain we see being engage every time people enjoy something more that could be art, beauty in the face, music or taste When people drink coco-cola dramatic change in brain activation. They show stronger activation in hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Both structure are memory structure.

Attention & Consciousness

Focusing on something, automatic attention. it's focusing of our minds in clear and vivid form.

And it’s a selection process. So in order to focus on some things we need to reject other things.

attention, is associated with between two different processes, one that is called bottom-up and one that is called top-down.

Top-down attention

If you are going into a store and you are looking for something particular. This is a top-down search. top-down attention as is where you need to focus your mental energy. You need to think hard about what you want to look at such as reading a boring book for example the frontal part of the brain and the parietal part of the brain in, is engaged. They are modulating the activation of the primary visual cortex and other visual regions of the brain.

Bottom-up attention

You are looking for some orange juice, for example within the store. You’re accidentally bumping into things. You see a piece of chocolate, for example. You didn't intend to buy it. You didn't intend to look for it. But you are accidentally looking at it. This is what we can call bottom-up attention. bottom-up attention, these are the things that automatically grab your attention. For

example, things here in the world, such as contrast, density, brightness, movement, and so forth are things that automatically grab your eye's attention. You automatically start to look at them.

Actually, there are certain receptors in your eyes that are more responsive to some things than other such as contrast and density. And through their signaling to the thalamus of the brain, it is deep structure of the brain. It engages visual attention. The thalamus then projects back to the primary visual cortex, the back of your head. What happens is that your eyes are detecting some changes. They're detecting differences, changes, movements and they are projecting that back to the brain. But the first place in the brain that receives the signal is the thalamus, a deep structure in the brain which then projects further back to the visual cortex, the primary visual cortex.

The effects bottom-up attention, which is also called visual saliency .Changing the saliency, the visual appearance of a product. People are more likely to look at it, and more likely to buy it. So this means that if you and change the way in which a product is visually appealing, then you can change the way in which that people are going to look at it automatically, and also the likelihood that they're going to buy it.

Tools or mathematical model for Attention & Consciousness

NeuroVision is a tool that allows researchers to upload videos and images and have that analyzed on the fly. Neurovision, is a tool that, predicts a certain kind of attention, the bottom-up attention perspective. So what people are automatically drawn to, things like contrast and density and color composition. And movement are all things that draw people's attention to them.

Neurovision is a model that modulates and emulates the way in which our primary visual cortex receives signals from the eyes and processes that information. It predicts, just based on

mathematics, the likelihood that people are going to look at particular parts of a screen or part of the visual work. Having this tool allows researchers to automatically analyze images and videos And the images and videos that are analyzed, point to regions that are most likely to grab people's attention automatically. It doesn't tell where people are motivated to look for, it tells what people are automatically going to look at.

Another studies found that in store walk. What you can see there is the red dots are indicating where people are looking while they are walking down the store. they're looking at the price, they're looking at the product, they're orienting themselves, looking at different signs. And at the same time they're also missing out some things, they're not looking at everything at once. So as you can see, attention, the visual attention that people are showing is a limited attentions span.

Sensory Neuromarketing

Brain is divided into different sections There at least five different sections. First, the occipital lobe, or the occipital cortex, is part as you can see here in the figure that is involved in visual processing Second, we have the parietal cortex as you can see in green.

And this part of the brain is involved in, among other things, attention, self-awareness and so forth. The temporal cortex, as you can see here in orange, is involved in language, memory and visual perception. The frontal cortex, as you can see here in purple, is

involved in many things such as motive control, planning, preference and working memory the insula, as you can see here in light green, which is involved in, among other things, emotions.

Basal ganglia

The basal ganglia consists of three different structures, such as the putamen, the caudate nucleus and the ventral striatum or nucleus circumference

Medial temporal lobe structures

That encompasses such as hippocampus, parietal cortex, entorhinal cortex, cortex and the amygdala. If you look more into the medial, or the middle side of the temporal lobe, this is what we call the medial temporal lobe structures.

Cingulate cortex

Which is on the middle side of the inner side of the brain as you can see here in purple.

We tend to divide this structure into the anterior or the frontal part, and the posterior, or the back part as well. What's important to realize about the brain is that there's no structure that is only having one function. So you don't see that there is a center for reward, or a center for memory or a center for this or that. What you do see instead is that one’s structure tend to on take several roles, and one function, such as memory, relies on the network of brain regions.

There three different concepts

Redundancy

Which is where a function is performed by two or more identical regions.

Degeneracy

In which a function is performed by two or more dissimilar regions of the brain.

Pluripotentiality

Which is a concept where one structure can take on many different roles.

As you can see, there's a lot of different structures that are important for consumer behavior, and some of them are overlapping in their functions, and some of them are really important for emotions while others are important for things like memory.

Illusion

There’s no white triangle. It's just an illusion.

This because the brain is trying to fill in with meaning. It tries to understand the world around it where there is not necessarily a meaning at all.

One studies conclude that the world is, at least part of it, an illusion. What you see and how we experience the world is not a mere reflection of how the world actually is. It's a reconstruction of the world.it tends to fragmentize the way it treats information.

Another studies found that what the brain does just to a flickering checkerboard. In this figure, you can see that if you look at a flickering checkerboard like this, you will see that the stronger activation of the primary visual cortex.

at movement. If you look at how the brain is activated to this, we will see that there's both the primary visual cortex, but also an additional region on each side of the brain. This is what we can call the movement regions of the brain.

When we look at an object such as a flower, what you can see is that the brain is treating information about the flower in different regions. Things like color, shape and movement is treated in different regions of the brain. But you don't see the flower as shape here, color here and movement here.

You have one coherent experience of the flower. So the brain is, in a way.

Merging the different information together to present a coherent picture of the flower.

Bottom part of the temporal cortex or the ventral or inferior temporal cortex regions that are specialized for processing faces or places. There are also two different processing streams of the brain, one that is called a dorsal stream, and one that is called a ventral stream. In the ventral stream that goes from the primary parietal cortex down to the temporal cortex, we can see a lot of information regarding the identity of different objects.

So our ability to recognize a bottle as a bottle, or a brand as a brand is depending on that stream of processing. Conversely, the dorsal stream is engaged when we are orienting ourselves in the world, when we are finding our way, or looking at a particular object in space. Also, how we are working with objects. So our ability to grasp and hold and manipulate objects depends on the dorsal stream.

Let's see the example of remote controls. If you take the remote control to your television set, try to hold it and mark the weight of it.

What some producers do is to add weight to the remote control, because many consumers believe that a heavier product is the same as the more quality products. This is same thing for hammer drills and many other products as well. Adding weight to a product signifies a higher quality.

For example, shoes, leather shoes. Today leather is so processed that it almost doesn't contain any odor at all. So, many producers are actually making up fragrances that smell like leather. And this produces an authentic leather experience for consumers. Another examples of bakeries. Just passing by a bakery, it smells delicious, right? Just adding the odor and passing it onto the street is an excellent advertising campaign for that single bakery.

In casinos, several places you can find that there's a slight odor of lemon. Because this has been shown that increased lemon odor also increases risk taking, especially in men.

increasing the intensity of an odor was pleasant until a certain point, after which the preference for that odor drops. So this means that the more you use them in order, the more people like it until a certain point. Interestingly, this was mostly found for women, while for men there was no such real effect.

Method for Sensory Neuromarketing

The sensory load chart

One of the studies found that McDonald's, people tend to rate sights and taste high, but things like sound and touch relatively low. Opera has a high impact on people's sights and especially sounds, but very low on touch, smell and taste.

References:

1. Milica Milosavljevic. Relative visual saliency differences induce sizable bias in consumer choice,Journal of Consumer Psychology 22 (2012) 67–74.

2. Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy,Branding the brain: A critical review and outlook,Journal of Consumer Psychology 22 (2012) 18–36.

3. Vicky Phan,Neuromarketing:Who Decides What You Buy?,2010,The Triple Helix, Inc.

4. Alex Hannaford,'Neuromarketing': can science predict what we'll buy?,Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013