Kindle Notes & Highlights
neuromarketing as any marketing or market research activity that uses the methods and techniques of brain science or is informed by the findings or insights of brain science.
people seem to have a natural preference for curved lines and edges compared to straight lines and pointy edges. We also tend to prefer designs that are simple, symmetrical, and have high contrast.
processing fluency (the ease with which an object can be identified and understood by our brains).
Neuromarketing says the best approach is to combine moderate levels of innovation with recognizable elements of familiarity.
According to most neuromarketers, the purpose of advertising is to create an emotional connection to a brand, which then gets translated into a sale when those brand connections get activated at the point of sale.
A story can activate the same areas in the brain that are activated by equivalent real-world experiences.
As the novelist William Gibson has famously observed, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
What’s so bad about improving our enjoyment by improving our perceptions, rather than spending money to improve material goods directly?
Consumers are, in fact, not easily fooled and will seek out what’s ultimately good for them, not what’s good for the marketer.
One of the principles of neuromarketing is that nonconscious impacts on people’s judgments and choices lose their power to influence when people are made aware of them.
we discuss the idea that the human brain is a cognitive miser, reluctant to spend any more mental energy than is absolutely necessary to get by in the world.
A miser is a person who doesn’t like to spend money. A really good miser knows lots of ways to avoid spending money, like coming up with the perfect excuse to make you pay the dinner bill. Our brains are also misers, but the currency they try to avoid spending is mental effort, the amount of cognitive activity needed to decide and act in the world, including deciding and acting as consumers and shoppers.
So, our attraction to novelty comes with a bit of a paradox attached: We’re drawn to novelty because we can learn from it, but we don’t usually like it until it becomes less novel.
The conscious brain is optimized for learning and planning, not making decisions.
Priming is a nonconscious brain process. It occurs quickly, automatically, and effortlessly. The mental process within which it works is called associative activation. This process is well known to psychologists and describes how exposure to one idea in our minds automatically activates other, associated ideas, which then can trigger physical responses in our bodies and, ultimately, complex behaviors like words and actions. For example, seeing a pizza ad on TV may prime eating, and you may find yourself getting a bowl of cereal at the next ad break. That’s priming.
The emerging consensus is that the primary role of the nonconscious is to keep us tied to the present, to provide automatic behavioral guidance “nudges” that orient us toward behavior that has a high likelihood of being safe, correct, and appropriate in the situation we find ourselves in.
Every time we retrieve a memory, we change it. This means that marketing not only invokes memories, but also literally alters them.
A second approach argues that attention is actually bad for advertising in some circumstances (such as TV ads) and for some purposes (such as brand-building), because the more people pay attention to an ad, the more likely they are to create mental counterarguments to the persuasive messaging in the ad and, therefore, develop resistance to the message.
