As more stores use âscent marketingâ to lure in customers with aromas, the battle for noses heats up. WSJâs Sarah Nassauer reports on Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Cinnabon.

BRANDS are constantly on the trawl to figure out how to sell you more stuff.

But market research doesn’t really tell marketers how you’ll behave because, sometimes, people lie. So to determine how to get you to spend more, brands are turning to neuroscience.

SCROLL DOWN FOR THE TOP MARKETING TRICKS

Neuromarketing is a relatively new, dedicated field that’s been gaining traction in the past 10 years. Marketers team up with scientists to see how your brain responds to certain stimuli and cues in marketing. In turn, marketing and advertising people use that information to provoke responses in you through all your senses.

Much of this isn’t new. Brands have been using cues such as colour for decades. For example, the colour red makes you think you’re hungry which is why the biggest fast food chains — McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut and Hungry Jacks — all generously splash the colour in its branding and venues. That’s right, you didn’t really want that chocolate sundae.

Neuromarketing author Roger Dooley said at the ADMA Creative Fuel conference in Sydney: “Only 5 per cent of customer decision making is conscious according to neuroscientists. 95 per cent of all decision processes is non-conscious, we’re not aware of what’s driving our behaviour.”

Most people aren’t aware they’re being influenced in ways that don’t factor into any logical decision making. Mr Dooley told news.com.au: “I would say most people are unaware of all the cues that drive them to buy. If you ask somebody if they bought something from a catalogue because of the picture on the front cover, they’ll say they didn’t. But changing the picture on the front can increase or decrease orders from the catalogue.

“People are absolutely influenced by it but they’re not aware they’re influenced by it.”

The two primary techniques neuromarketers use is functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to figure out what makes our brains tick. FMRI works in tracking the blood flow to areas of your brain whereas EEG records activity of electrical activity along the scalp. This helps marketers figure out what cues appeal to your subconscious.

Here are some common tricks marketers use to encourage you to spend more money:

Colour — as mentioned above, colour is commonly used to evoke different emotions or behaviours in you, such as red with hunger. Or brands will use yellow in their branding to seem more playful, friendly or warm — think Chupa Chups.

Scent — if you’ve ever stepped into a supermarket and caught a whiff of freshly baked bread at the front, then you may have forgotten all about your resolve to stick to your shopping list. Scent is the sense most associated with memory and the smell of bread or roast chicken can bring up memories of big family feasts. It’s also designed to make you salivate and you know what they say about shopping when you’re hungry ...

Scarcity — Creating the sense that something is a limited time only offer can encourage you to buy. Mr Dooley said a study once asked consumers to rate how much they liked chocolate chip cookies from two jars. One jar had two cookies in it and the other jar contained many. Study participants said the cookies in the jar with only two cookies in it were more desirable. This trick is commonly used by airlines who will say there are only “5 seats left” on a particular flight to prompt you to book that ticket right then and there.

Liking — Companies want you to think they’re just like you. Any bond or connection they can create with you humanises them. Mr Dooley gave the example of US company Petsmart whose management team poses with cats and dogs in their corporate headshots on its website, designed to say to its customers ‘we’re just like you’.

Decoy — This is also known as the framing effect. Mr Dooley pointed to an example where a publication was selling two kinds of subscriptions — online only for $59 and online and print for $129 a year. Most people chose the online only option until a third option was introduced: print only for $129. As a result, the higher priced online and print option seemed like better value and a significant amount of people shifted to that option. Framing is also why people order the mid-range wine at a restaurant despite knowing nothing about the wine itself.

Dollar sign — Mr Dooley said a dollar sign in front a figure makes people think an item is more expensive. Same if punctuation such a comma is inserted into the price which extends the look of the price. So people are more likely to hesitate at buying a TV that costs $1,299.00 than if it’s priced as 1299. He said restaurants often omit the dollar sign on menus so you’re more likely to pay 35 for that steak than $35.00.

Font — The font used in marketing materials can have an effect on what you think of a product. Mr Dooley said a menu printed in plain simple font for tomato soup saw 64 per cent of respondents classify it as “desirable” but when that’s changed to fancy cursive font, that figure shifted to 100 per cent. He also gave the example of menus for gourmet burger restaurants who will use fancy font to make you think more effort went into making the burger and therefore justifying the $30 price.

So now that you know some of the tricks to look out for, will you be able to make better purchasing decisions?

Not necessarily.

“There’s no way of being so self-aware that you can tune it all out,” Mr Dooley said. “The way you can prevent yourself from being overly influenced by it is by stepping back as a consumer before you buy something and ask yourself if it’s really something you want or need right now.

“You can’t eliminate those influences but when you bring it back to rational mode, what you’re doing is engaging in system two thinking. System one thinking is automatic — you smell baking bread and you pick it up and throw it in your cart. System two is you pick up the bread but ask if you already have bread at home or if you’re going on holidays tomorrow and no one is going to eat it, or other scenarios.

“If you use that kind of analysis, then you’re engaging in system two and you can make a better purchase decision.”