Desirae is the President & CEO of Clairant Services, LLC. a digital marketing agency based in New Jersey providing simplified marketing for small businesses and start ups. Desirae shared that neuro-marketing is near and dear to her heart. When she started her college career in marketing, she took a Consumer Behavior course and which she considered the most fascinating course she ever took in her life. The course changed her Marketing degree into a Neuroscience degree and she then became a Neuroscientist for six years.

What is Neuromarketing?

Desirae gave a couple of examples of how big brains are using neuromarketing as well as how small business owners like you can use neuromarketing to your advantage.

Neuromarketing is the psychology behind consumerism. It's the neurological reasons why we make purchasing decisions and is the subconscious of decision-making. A lot of times, we're choosing products and brands and we don't even know why we're doing it. For some reason, we're attracted to some and not to others and we make a lot of our purchasing decisions based on emotions.

The Harvard Business Review defines neuromarketing as “the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers' motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas.”

Examples of Neuromarketing

Liquor Store Story

Goal: To increase its sales of certain types of wines from different countries. 

What They Did: When they spoke about their goals to their marketing experts, neuromarketing came into play. What they found was when they were playing different types of music, it would influence different types of buying for liquor and wines in their store.

So for example, on the days that they played French music, they would sell more French bottles of wine. On the days they played German music, they would sell more German bottles of wine.

But what's very interesting is that later on, when they actually asked the people who purchased and made the decision to buy other French or German bottles of wine, they had no idea why they made that purchasing decision. None of them said, “oh, well you were playing the music so I bought that type of wine”.  

This means we are making purchasing decisions subconsciously without being aware of why we're buying certain things and not others.

Google Story

Goal: To Increase Google ad clicks

We all know Google and we all click on ads and/or links on the search engine results pages. When you search a query in Google, you press search and then a whole bunch of results will come up with links. At the very top, those are ads that people pay for. Below that line are organic results that are doing well with SEO. They got up there naturally rather than actually paying per click.

Every time somebody clicks on one of those ads, the business owner who owns such an ad will pay per click and that means more revenue for Google. 

What They Did: They researched 41 different colors of blue for those Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and for the ads that pop up. When they put the blues in front of a focus group, they found that a specific blue was clicked on a lot more than all the others. Google changed the color of the ads to that specific blue color and then they had a $200 million increase in sales later.

It's mind-blowing because nobody really anticipates that changing just a tone of blue is going to make a difference, especially a $200 million difference. Nobody would consciously be aware that one shade of blue is better than the other and would make them actually click on it but that's how neuromarketing works. However, you have to understand your target market and know what they're looking for in order to make those changes like what Google did. 

Amazon Story

Goal #1: To stimulate purchases in their shopping cart

What They Did: They studied the colors, just like Google. They studied the shapes of their buttons, the add to cart button and the buy now button.

In the beginning, they had an orange color add-to-cart button with a very square shape and sharp corners. They changed it to yellow and then it evolved into curved lines. This simple change resulted in a $20 million increase in sales.

Goal #2: To reduce buyers’ decision-making anxiety.

When you go to Amazon and you're looking up let's say dog treats, and 30 or 40 different dog treats come up, it’s natural to get overwhelmed with the number of options to choose from.

What They Did: Amazon added a little ribbon that says #1 Best Seller on those products with the highest number of sold items. They also added reviews of each product to reduce the buyers’ anxiety when there are so many options to choose from.

Goal #3: To improve user experience.

They did an experiment for user experience and realized that once somebody went into Amazon, people immediately start adding items to their carts. And when they click Buy Now, a form would pop up where they have to either sign up or sign in to their account.

People ended up clicking the back button as they didn't want to deal with a log-in form. 

What They Did: They put the form at the beginning of the experience instead. Now, before you start shopping, you need to fill out the form. And by improving the user experience, they increased their sales by $300 million.

We are such impulsive buyers in anything that we do. In this day and age, we're so impulsive that a simple 30-second process of typing a username and password or signing up for something is already too much work.

Pro Tip for an E-commerce Business: Make sure your website’s speed performance is good and make sure to offer different types of payments. Adding PayPal as an option of payment will increase sales across the board by 18%.

How Can You Leverage Neuromarketing?

1. Know your audience!
2. Create homemade focus groups 
3. Offer something for free - the power of free is very, very effective. For example, if you're offering buy two, get one free, it is more effective than “getting three for the price of two”.
4. Offer choices for price packages - if for example you only have one package available, make a deluxe choice so it makes that first choice look a lot cheaper.
5.  Reduce the buyer's decision anxiety - add reviews on your products to make people feel better about their buying decisions.
6. Power of scarcity - limit the number of products allowed to be purchased 
7. Sense of control 
8. Make your website fast! - You will get more conversions if your website is fast.
   
   

Before ending her presentation, Desirae shared another interesting story for you!

One very large event center was tired of spending so much money on their custodians cleaning the walls behind their urinals.

Naturally, the behavior of men, is they like to aim at something when they're peeing. What the neuro-marketers suggested is to add a little fly on the most strategic spot on the urinal where the least splatter will happen.

Sure enough, it reduced custodial costs by 80% in the men's washroom. 

ABOUT DESIRAE HALUK